/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25373271/STK451_Internet_Service_Providers_B.jpg "ISPs say there’s no need for new customer service rules; everything is great")
“The gates of hell are open night and day.”
[Note: The next two sections contain detailed spoilers for Gladiator II.]
Gladiator II opens with Lucius trailing his hands through seeds, both a foreshadowing of his future in the arena and a callback to Gladiator’s iconic shot of Maximus trailing his hands through wheat. For Mescal, the opening shot is not only an echo of the original but a poignant way to explore the meaning of life, death and fertility in the Roman Empire.
“That was a Ridley idea,” says Mescal. “It didn’t exist in the original script. It was Ridley attaching and kind of foreshadowing a bloodline relevance to the end of the first film with the hand in the wheat, and the hand in the grain is an elegant way to ease that transition. It’s the proximity of life and death in that cultural context. It was much closer than I think we experience today. How do you bring an audience to that understanding?”
Lucius escapes death in the opening sequence, but continues to face it head-on throughout the rest of the film. “Lucius has lost everything, so he doesn’t really care if he lives or dies, which makes him somebody who’s difficult to fight against,” the actor explains. “How do you fight against somebody when all the chips are down and they don’t really care? It makes him somebody who’ll bite a lump out of a baboon’s arm, or he’ll just do whatever it takes to win and not look after himself in combat. It makes him a good gladiator.”
For Nielsen, Lucilla’s tenuous survival as a pawn of Geta and Caracalla added a level of freedom to her on-screen chemistry with Pascal. With both trapped in metaphorical prisons due to their political roles, neither can avoid the sense of approaching doom that hangs over their marriage. “There’s a certain gallantry in ignoring danger, and insisting on joy and play in the face of whatever is out there,” says Nielsen. “That’s where I was coming from, and I had the best possible partner in that.”
As for Quinn, one of the many characters who meets a brutal end at the hands of Macrinus, seeing his severed head paraded in front of Roman senators in the hands of Denzel Washington was a surreal career milestone. “Doesn’t happen every Wednesday,” he says. “That was an interesting day at work.”
