A select audience of giddy fans were on hand, along with a visibly excited press corps, to meet Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, Connie Nielsen, and Fred Hechinger prior to the Centerpiece to the Centerpiece screening of Gladiator II, the highly anticipated sequel to Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning sword-and-sandal epic, on November 4 at the 37th Tokyo International Film Festival.
 
Gladiator II features a new story, set more than a decade after Gladiator, which won five awards at the 73rd Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor (Russell Crowe), out of 12 nominations. Helmed once again by Ridley Scott, Gladiator II follows Lucius (Mescal), son of Maximus (Crowe) and Lucilla (Nielsen) as he seeks vengence against Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) and the Roman Army after his home is invaded. Former slave Macrinus (Washington) then enlists Lucius to fight as a gladiator for him in a plot to overthrow Emperor Caracalla (Hechinger).
 
Mescal, who replaces Crowe as the titular lead, said what struck him about Lucius was that — unlike Crowe’s people’s hero Maximus — Lucius is an “anti-hero” initially motivated by revenge, but who “becomes more traditionally heroic as he steps into his own legacy and bloodline.”
 
Gladiator II raises the stakes on the first film’s epic scale and visceral action. Mescal is at the center of these scenes, fighting for his life in battle after battle against an assortment of fierce warriors and wild animals, including raging rhinos and baboons. “I feel like we spent three or four weeks getting my body run through the mill,” joked Mescal.
 
Asked how he was able to get up again and again after so many intense action set pieces, Mescal first gave credit to director Scott and his trainers for motivating him, but also said that the greatest drive came from the scale of the production itself: “Standing in the middle of the colosseum, directed by Ridley Scott, attached to a film so many people utterly adore, if that doesn’t give you adrenaline, you should probably think about another profession.”
 
Washington said he took on the role of Macrinus because “it was a multi-award-winning film, by the same director, and it had a great script.” Gladiator II is Washington’s second experience working with Scott after American Gangster in 2007, but the legendary actor replied this time around was “easier,” as Mescal did all the heavy lifting.
 
The scheming and cunning Macrinus is the kind of character not seen in the first film. Washington said he and the cast had “complete trust” in Scott, but also that the scale of the production itself helped him get lost in the role: “There were so many cameras and angles, I didn’t know where he was going to be anyway, so it freed me up to have fun.”
 
Nielsen reprises her role as Lucilla, the main love interest of Maximus in Gladiator and mother to Lucius in Gladiator II. Compared to the first film, she remarked that while the size of the sets was the roughly the same, “There’s an added sense of excess and vulgarity and corruption to the new Rome. Twenty years have passed, and Lucilla has watched as every norm of power has transformed into utter narcissism and self-serving behavior by a very small group of elites.”
 
Nielsen said the changes are “subtle but unmistakable” displays of Rome’s “inevitable decline.” While the latest special and visual effects technology was deployed, Nielsen revealed how Scott and his crew also used tricks and techniques from the classical studio era. For example, they added more to the frontispiece to enable shooting from multiple angles and create the illusion of a 360-degree Collosseum.
 
Asked by a member of the audience if she imagined there would be a sequel with Lucius as Maximus’s and Lucilla’s son at the time of Gladiator’s production, she confessed she did not. She did add, however, that she had created a secret story based on a scene in the first film where she introduces her son to Maximus, and had imagined this child was indeed Maximus’s son. “I was so angry on behalf of the real Lucilla that she had been married off to her step-uncle when she was just 16 years old,” she explained. “So I made a story in my mind that she had a beautiful moment with Maximus — who was at the time a lowly soldier and wouldn’t have been allowed to be near her — and that was her revenge over all of these men who tried to tell her what she should do with her life.”
 
Hechinger, whose deliciously vile Caracalla embodies Rome’s vulgarity, echoed that it felt like the crew “built Rome” and — surrounded by animals and Romans — “you forget you’re making a movie.” Costume designer Janty Yates, who also worked on the first film, makes him the symbol of the film’s excess, bedecking him in gold and putting “rings on every finger.” He also shared that it was easier to get into scenes because much of the shooting was not broken up into discrete parts or recorded weeks later on a soundstage, but instead shot with multiple cameras in a continuous sequence, allowing the actors to “figure out in real time what you would need to do to get the job done.”
 
The film is the first-ever Centerpiece screening in TIFF’s long history, a slot created exclusively for Gladiator II. A visibly nervous Hashimoto Ai — a Japanese actor who is also a jury member for this year’s Competition section — presented the guests with flowers in honor of their visit.
 
Events
Gladiator II Press Conference
Guest: Paul Mescal (Actor), Denzel Washington (Actor), Connie Nielsen (Actor), Fred Hechinger (Actor) and more.