I got so pumped during Gladiator II I could have done damage – but Ridley banned me from big stunt, reveals Paul Mescal
WHEN Paul Mescal won the lead role in the new Gladiator movie sequel, he didn’t plan to get a ripped body.
But by the end of training for the part of a Roman swordsman fighting to the death in the Colosseum, he was so buff he felt ready to do some “real damage”.
The 28-year-old Irish actor, who found fame in 2020 BBC TV drama Normal People, is stepping into Russell Crowe’s sandals in Gladiator II, which is sure to be one of the biggest box office hits of the year.
At the outset, Paul had no experience of the fighting, horse riding or bodybuilding that was required for his character to take on trained killers and even a marauding rhino.
So months of intense training followed, and he recalls: “You start feeling like your body can inflict damage, which is weird.
“It changes the way you move and operate. And that’s a fun kind of place to live when it’s make-believe.
“On a film this scale you have the best trainer you could ever imagine, you have your food delivered to the door.
“That requires discipline, but it’s not hard work. That’s just people at the top of their game telling you what to do.”
Roman noble
In the film, Paul plays Lucius Verus, son of Maximus the gladiator — made famous by Russell Crowe in the Oscar-winning original in 2000.
After the first film earned more than four times its £80million budget, a sequel has been in the pipeline for more than two decades.
It was only after director Sir Ridley Scott saw Paul as student Connell in Normal People — and thought he had “the nose, the profile” of a Roman noble — that he realised he had found his man.
Paul had been a relatively unknown stage actor before Normal People brought him TV fame.
He followed it up with several critically acclaimed but small-budget movies, including Aftersun, The Lost Daughter, with Olivia Colman, and All Of Us Strangers, with Andrew Scott.
The roles were a world away from Gladiator, and he says: “I had done one fight scene before, so this was a bit of a step-up.
“And to be totally fair, independent budgets don’t really accommodate the safety of actors, generally.
“So we’d kind of just wing it and hope that the other actor doesn’t punch you in the face.”
No such risks were taken on the £130million Gladiator II, which stars Denzel Washington as an ambitious gladiator boss and The Mandalorian’s Pedro Pascal as a Roman general.
Paul adds: “We had a great stunt team on this.”
But before he began filming with Sir Ridley, he had a lot of prep to do with personal trainer Tim Blakeley, who worked with him every day.
On The Graham Norton Show, Paul described the ex-Royal Navy man as “circling me like a shark” to assess which muscles needed the most development.
Fans of the Irish heart-throbs get plenty of chances to check out the results of those extensive workouts in Gladiator II because Paul goes topless in several scenes.
He is not quite as well built as Russell Crowe was in the original, but he is close.
Ridley, 86, describes Paul as a “very nice, very sweet, very straightforward guy”, but the actor thinks he has a tough edge.
He told GQ magazine: “My agent refers to me openly as a psychopath when it comes to work.
“I feel an intense desire to have this for ever. I want this to never stop. So with that comes a kind of neurosis of control.”
But once he set foot in the scale model of Rome’s Colosseum in Malta in the heat of summer for the main part of the shoot, he started to worry he might be out of his depth.
Acting with Oscar-winner Denzel was also pretty daunting.
But Ridley told Paul: “Your nerves are no good to me,” and he got on with the job.
By the end of the shoot, it was the actor who was begging the director to let him do bigger and better stunts.
Paul tells how he had to persuade Ridley to let him perform a dangerous jump on to a horse.
He says: “I’d rehearsed it for three, four, five weeks in the lead-up to it.
“And then as we were getting closer to filming it, Ridley got nervous about me coming off the horse.
“The week before, he goes, ‘No f***ing way you’re doing that stuff’. So I was devastated, I petitioned him every single day. I was going in, annoying him.”
Finally Ridley relented, but told Paul that if he was injured — which would add huge sums to the movie’s budget — “You owe me two Bentleys.”
Paul says: “Thankfully, I didn’t come off the horse, and I didn’t have to pay him two Bentleys.”
Gladiator II looks sure to bring global stardom for Paul, who is dating singer Gracie Abrams and previously went out with singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers.
In Britain he is already hugely influential, especially for what he wears.
A necklace his character Connell wore in Normal People became a big-selling hit with Gen Z, and now men are copying Paul’s preference for shorts.
His younger sister Nell, 21, has told him he is responsible for the “shorts epidemic” and “too many men in London acting the b***ks”.
Incredibly intense
He is well aware that a lot more people will want his autograph from now on, though just how many will depend on the success of the movie.
Paul was understandably nervous about seeing it, saying: “The pressure of watching it for the first time is incredibly intense.”
But after viewing the immaculately made drama alone, Paul realised he was “in the hands of a master” thanks to the skills that Ridley has honed over more than five decades in the industry.
King Charles and Queen Camilla will watch Paul’s performance at a special royal premiere next Wednesday in London.
Then the public get their first chance to see the long-anticipated movie two days later on November 15.
Paul has three more movies lined up after Gladiator II — The History Of Sound, with Peaky Blinders actor Josh O’Connor, then playing William Shakespeare in historical drama Hamnet, and a Paul Linklater musical, Merrily We Roll Along.
But right now he is trying to come to terms with what has just happened in his career.
He says: “I did not think Ridley would be asking me to be in this film. Probably every single day on this set was something I was never expecting to do in my career, full stop. “So to get to do it, it’s just like f*ing insane.”