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Paul Mescal’s Road to ‘Gladiator II’: Rejecting ‘Big Studio Franchise-y’ Offers, Convincing Ridley Scott to Let Him Do His Own Stunts and More
Paul Mescal tells all on making "Gladiator 2" and convincing Ridley Scott to let him film his own stunts.
In a little over four years, across a TV show, a classic play and a handful of films, the blue-eyed boy from the small town of Maynooth in Ireland’s County Kildare, the son of a schoolteacher and a police officer, has cemented himself as one of the finest actors working today. By the time Mescal became TV’s lockdown heartthrob thanks to “Normal People” in early 2020, a script was in the works that set the story two decades after the original and centered on Lucius, the nephew of Joaquin Phoenix’s despicable emperor Commodus (and revealed to be the secret son of Maximus). Lucius, who had been shipped to safety in Numidia as a child, is dragged back to Rome as a man in shackles and sold to Macrinus (Washington), a freed slave who has risen up the ranks and now has his own stable of gladiators (and a side hustle in both weaponry and hot young men).
Or read this on Variety
