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
While I wait to meet up with Paul Mescal, eight men in short shorts walk past on the street. It may be a surprisingly sunny late September morning in London, but it’s cold — not the weather for exposed thighs — and these gentlemen don’t look like they’re out for a jog.
“I have noticed certain similarities in certain specific boroughs of London,” Mescal says upon his arrival, when I ask if he’s spotted any lookalikes on his travels. He’s smirking, quite possibly because a man sporting Mescal short shorts, Mescal scruffy facial hair and a little Mescal mullet has just strolled past us with the sort of comic timing a director would have required several takes to get so precisely. “For the record, I don’t think I’m responsible,” he says of the upsurge in short shorts, arguing that he’s merely dressing the same as the vast majority of Irishmen who play Gaelic Athletic Association football. Few are convinced.
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“He’s somehow managed to make something that’s not really cool look really cool,” says close friend and “Foe” co-star Saoirse Ronan. “And when he paired it with the mullet and mustache a couple of years ago, I was like, ‘OK, this is either gonna go one way or the other.’”
We’re now year four into the Paul Mescal-ification of the Western world, and we know which way it’s going. But thanks to 86-year-old filmmaking legend Ridley Scott and several legions of Roman soldiers in togas, Mescal is about to see whether he has the legs to be a Hollywood blockbuster leading man in “Gladiator II,” which Paramount Pictures opens in theaters on Nov. 22.
“That’s pressure, man!” says Denzel Washington, among the luminaries who have supporting roles to Mescal’s “Gladiator” hero. “And he’s coming in behind Russell Crowe! And he pulled it off!”
Scott’s epic return to the Colosseum is more than just a sequel. It’s the quarter-century-in-the-making follow-up to a piece of cinema history. And for Mescal, it’s the latest step in a career trajectory so insanely steep it can’t really be overexaggerated. (Ronan initially describes it as “catastrophic,” but then corrects herself — “I meant ‘meteoric’! Not ‘catastrophic’!”)
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.
BAFTA and Olivier awards, Emmy and Oscar nominations, have confirmed his talent, as has a growing fan base enthused by his nuanced portrayal of masculinity and fragility across a series of quietly devastating performances. But now he’s feeling the weight of Rome — and, more importantly, a $250 million-plus epic everyone is hoping has the firepower to ignite a flagging box office. “I do feel the pressure, and I do feel the desire for this to make money,” he says. “The box office needs a shot in the arm, and if films like ‘Gladiator II’ aren’t doing it, it would be concerning. So I do feel a responsibility.”
It’s not just the fate of the theatrical business that will be impacted if “Gladiator II” fails to draw crowds to the multiplexes. The film’s massive budget means that it will need to be one of the year’s biggest success stories, grossing north of $600 million, if it has a prayer of breaking even. That’s a figure that’s hard to reach for a movie that doesn’t come as part of a comic book or sci-fi franchise. If it reaches those lofty heights, it will place Mescal among a rising group of young stars, such as Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, who can open a major studio movie. But if it falls short, it could stall his ascent and limit opportunities.
We meet at the Nobu Hotel in Shoreditch, tucked away from the main road. Mescal’s been staying here while he shoots Chloé Zhao’s feature adaptation of the Maggie O’Farrell novel “Hamnet,” about the loss of Shakespeare’s only son (Mescal plays the young Bard alongside Jessie Buckley as his wife). He does have a long-term Airbnb in the city, and he’s “in the process” of buying his own place in North London, which he says he should be ready to move into by the end of the year. But for this production, he wanted something with services. “This shoot was extremely challenging emotionally, and there’s just a weird comfort that comes from going back to your room and the bed’s made and you just get to go …” He mimics crashing onto the mattress, devoid of thoughts.
But today he’s upbeat (and notably not in his own signature style, dressed in more weather-appropriate baggy light brown jeans, a maroon Kappa sweatshirt and a thick grey trucker jacket). “Hamnet” wrapped yesterday, and this afternoon he’s getting fitted up for the “Gladiator” world tour. It’s his first, and one Oscar pundits are predicting will continue throughout the awards race. He’s been here before, of course, with “Aftersun,” but missed the usual hoopla as he was onstage doing “A Streetcar Named Desire,” for which he won an Olivier. “I couldn’t campaign,” he says, “so it kind of protected me from that thing that would make me anxious — when it’s like, ‘You’re in the mix!,’ whatever that means.”
It’s strange hearing Mescal talk about anxiety. While he may play tortured souls like few else, he comes across as someone who has ridden the intensity of the past few years with remarkable calm. But chill, he says, he isn’t. “If you ask anybody close to me … zero chill, zero fucking chill, manic, mental,” he says. Just two weeks after we meet he’s being honored by the Academy in L.A. alongside Quentin Tarantino and Rita Moreno. “I mean, talk about imposter syndrome!” he says, wide-eyed in near-bewilderment at the prospect. But he acknowledges that the “imposter syndrome is diminishing a little bit.”
There shouldn’t be much left after “Gladiator 2” finishes its campaign.
“But I am wondering how my patience will fare,” he says. “How many times have you seen the original ‘Gladiator’? When was the first time you saw it?” Mescal laughs. “Not that you asked the same question!”
Mescal was 13 when he first watched the original “Gladiator.” “I was at home with my dad. I feel like for a lot of dads it was a big film, like, ‘Come on, son, let’s watch ‘Gladiator’!” he says.
It was 2009 and the sequel — first discussed soon after the release of the multiple-Oscar-winning first — had already been through several brutal development rounds. Among the wild ideas sent to rest in Elysium was Nick Cave’s infamous “Christ Killer” screenplay, in which Crowe’s Maximus is resurrected and sent through time to murder Jesus and his disciples. There were scenes in which Maximus fought in the Crusades, WWII and the Vietnam War. It was mercifully scrapped. 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).
It was Scott who spotted the young Irishman in his small-screen breakout as a teenager struggling with his mental health. “The leading guy immediately caught my attention,” the director says, adding that there was a “touch of Richard Harris” about him. With the “Gladiator II” screenplay nearing a final draft, Scott says, “From then on he was in the forefront of my mind.”
When the two finally spoke over Zoom in late 2022, Mescal had already been cutting a swath through the indie film scene. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s 2021 “The Lost Daughter” — where he played a hunky hotel pool attendant — came first, and Mescal became the toast of Cannes the following year for his performance as a depressed young father in “Aftersun.”
It was just a half-hour chat with Scott. “There were whispers of an audition process,” says Mescal. “I’d always assumed that would be the next step.” But no audition was necessary. “It all happened so quickly.”
“Gladiator II” wasn’t the first major Hollywood role to come Mescal’s way. “Other quite big studio, franchise-y” offers had been sent over the years, he says, although he won’t say what (nor will he confirm whether any were in the superhero world — “Don’t start!” he warns when asked). But most blockbuster movies didn’t interest him the way “Gladiator” did. “I wasn’t like, ‘I need to do this.’ It was really just Ridley and ‘Gladiator,’ and I felt like I was ripe for this kind of big film,” he says. “I played sports growing up; I know what it is to throw myself around. I look Roman. All of those things. And it’s Ridley Scott!”
There were still nerves about stepping into such a monumental spectacle. “I mean, going from something like ‘Aftersun,’ where it’s about looking into people’s souls, trying to figure out human beings, to this.” He laughs.
So he dug into the script and found more than just swords, sandals and a high body count. “Lucius goes through the fucking wringer,” he says. Over the course of the film, Lucius loses everything and feels betrayed, even by his own mother. “I was like, that’s a great arc to go on. And I felt like there were opportunities within the film to act — to do the part of the job that I love.”
Of course, the role could have gone to a “more action actor,” something Mescal admits he has little experience with. “But there’s lots of latent trauma behind it all,” he says, cracking a smile. “And I’m your guy for that.”
The shoot kicked off in June 2023 in Morocco with the film’s 14-minute opening sequence, which Mescal calls “one of the best battle scenes Ridley has ever shot.”
A vast Roman fleet — led by Pedro Pascal’s general Marcus Acacius — invades and conquers Numidia, the last free city in Africa, in a spectacle of ships, soldiers, flaming rocks, arrows, swords and death. 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).
This is a very different Rome from the one left by Crowe’s Maximus. Twenty years on, the city has descended into a bacchanal fueled by sex, wine and bloodlust, overseen by twin emperors (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger) struggling to contain their own inbred, syphilitic insanity.
In Morocco, it was just Mescal and Pascal (alongside hundreds of extras), so the two found time to get to know each other. “To be with him from the very start felt like we began the journey together, so we got very, very close,” Mescal says. “Pedro’s a luminous, talented and kind person. He’s really one of the good guys.”
Right from the offset, it’s clear Lucius are Marcus are going to have an absolute humdinger of a scrap, something Mescal says they “were both always really looking forward to — I think we were quite aware that, from an audience’s perspective, it was a hugely important moment in the film.”
The “rest of the gang,” as Mescal calls them, joined when the production moved a couple weeks later to Malta, where Rome and the Colosseum had been painstakingly reconstructed. The very real, very to-scale nature of Scott’s set didn’t just take Mescal’s breath away, but banished fears he’d be fighting tennis balls in front of green screens.
For a wild scene in which he battles baboons, stuntmen were trained to move like the animals. For one in which he faces a charging rhino, it was a radio-controlled, 3D-printed rhino. “But full size,” he notes. “Absolutely insane.”
In Malta, Mescal met Washington and prepared himself mentally for their first scene together, learning to switch off the part of his brain screaming, “Holy fuck, I’m in a scene with Denzel!” He adds, “It could have been overwhelming, but I kind of set out in my head that I’m totally entitled to admire this man and see him as an idol, but I’ve got to protect myself from that when we’re working together. I’ve got to treat Denzel as I would any other actor.”
The two turned out to have a “very easy working relationship,” Mescal says. There were a couple weeks when Mescal had him “all to myself, so I could pull up a chair between takes and talk Shakespeare and plays.” Mescal says he convinced Washington to return to the stage. “I said, ‘Have you played ‘Othello’? You should do it. And he’s like, ‘I’ve played it before.’ So I just said, ‘Well, you should play it again!’” The pep talk worked because Washington will appear as the Moor of Venice alongside Jake Gyllenhaal’s Iago on Broadway in February.
Washington admired Mescal’s ability to bring it. “He went in there and hit the ball back over the net,” he says. “I can hit the ball pretty hard, but he was hitting the ball right back at me. So I was like, ‘OK, youngster!’”
But all this fun couldn’t halt the looming SAG-AFTRA strike, which hit the “Gladiator II” production five weeks before it was due to wrap. Mescal wasn’t working the day everything stopped, but says “people were sitting in makeup chairs” when the call came — at around 8 a.m. local time — and the Colosseum gates slammed down. “I’m now incredibly glad we did go on strike,” Mescal says, “in terms of what it means for the industry. But at the time, you’re just trying to see the woods for the trees, and you’re like, ‘Fuck, five weeks to go.’” He stuck around in Malta for a few days but then went home to his London Airbnb, scouring the trades each morning “trying to figure out what was going on.”
There’s a scene toward the end of “Gladiator II” where Mescal’s Lucius, near broken after several rounds of carnage, mounts a horse in hot pursuit of Macrinus. While far from the film’s most action-heavy of moments, it required a significant degree of skill, so Mescal, keen to do as many stunts as possible, “trained for fucking months.” But as they got closer to the shoot, Scott changed his mind about letting Mescal do the stunt.
“Two weeks before the scene, Ridley says, ‘You’re not fucking doing it,’ and I was like, ‘What the fuck?,’ and we had this argument,” Mescal says.
Scott’s reluctance wasn’t anything to do with his star, but instead dated to some equine advice he was given while shooting his 1977 debut feature “The Duellists”: For insurance purposes, only shoot your actors once they’re already on their horses.
“And at the end of the shoot,” Scott says, “for the very last shot, Keith [Carradine] goes, ‘Can I go ride this bloody horse then?’ Twenty minutes later, the horse ran him into a tree and he smashed his femur.”
Almost half a century on, another lead star was being just as insistent. “I was pestering him constantly,” says Mescal. “And then the day before, he goes, ‘OK, you can do the stunt, but if you come off, it’s two Bentleys.’”
Mescal took the expensive gamble, doing the scene in a couple takes. “No Bentleys were required, thank fuck,” the actor says.
Of course, becoming a gladiator is more than just jumping on a horse without falling off; Mescal had to bulk up for the role. As he says, he “needed to be big.”
He set his goal at 22 pounds. Mescal was already muscular, having beefed up to play Stanley Kowalski in “Streetcar,” and the extra weight would bring him up to 194 pounds. So six months before shooting began, he hit the gym and had four full meals delivered to his home every day. “Lots of meat. Mostly chicken,” he says. The training sessions were short, intense bursts, six days a week. “I don’t have a huge amount of patience, so it was hard and fast, then you recover and go again,” he says.
Mescal’s stage work suited the new regime. “I’d get up and train in Soho at like 11 a.m., go to the theater and spend the day there, go home, go to bed,” he recalls. But did the other actors notice a gradual difference in Stanley’s physique? “Toward the end, they were probably thinking, ‘Hm, he’s eating his vegetables!’”
While that was a challenging experience, it wouldn’t be the most extreme thing Mescal would do for a role. That came straight after “Gladiator II” wrapped, when he began prepping for “The History of Sound” and had to shed all the weight he’d gained and more. He needed to lose 26 pounds in two months. “It was fucking miserable,” he says, shaking his head as he smokes his second cigarette of the morning. “And it wasn’t to get emaciated — it was just to lose the muscle. Just fucking misery.”
It was a misery he endured for a good cause — namely, Oliver Hermanus’ upcoming drama about two young men who become romantically involved as they travel through rural New England in 1919. “Of all the scripts I’ve ever read,” he says, “that’s the one that broke my heart the most.”
Mescal loved the project so much that he didn’t just act in it, he came aboard as an executive producer (his first producer credit). It’s a precursor to launching his own production company — one he says will be “super small and writer-led.” Nothing has been formalized yet, but he’s optioned two “under the radar” books he considers among his favorites. He won’t reveal more, but are they emotionally devastating and full of latent trauma? “Oh yeah, that’s definitely the territory!”
“The History of Sound,” which co-stars Josh O’Connor of “Challengers,” also brings Mescal back to independent film, a world he admits he feels more closely aligned to. “The center of my career is independent films, and everything else comes as a result. But that’s where I will return.”
Mescal has shot two sections of Stephen Sondheim’s decades-spanning musical “Merrily We Roll Along,” which Richard Linklater plans to film over 20 years in order to do justice to the story of art and friendship. The adaptation co-stars Broadway veterans Ben Platt and Beanie Feldstein. “I love singing,” Mescal says. “I’m not able to sing as well as Ben and Beanie, two of the greatest voices on planet Earth, but I’m trying to keep up.”
Then there’s “Streetcar,” which he’s bringing back to the West End for a limited run in early 2025 before taking it to the U.S. for the first time. Washington applauds Mescal’s decision to tread the boards so soon after “Gladiator II”: “It’s the right thing to do, and shows he’s a legitimate, serious actor and has got his head screwed on right.”
There are also ongoing chats with his “Normal People” co-star (and best friend) Daisy Edgar-Jones about working together again. “We’re basically flirting around the idea of what the next thing should look like.”
Mescal is, as they say, booked and busy “for at least the next two years.” But his hectic schedule isn’t merely because acting is something he describes as “one of the biggest loves of my life” and “the first thing I think about when I wake up.” It’s also a coping mechanism for his post-“Gladiator” landscape. “Because it just puts me into a routine and separates me from the noise of it all.”
Short short sightings aside, walking around the streets of London with Mescal is a comical experience. There are numerous double takes from those passing us in the street, knowing smiles and gentle taps on elbows. At a small corner cafe where he orders us takeaway coffees (he’s a flat white, one sugar guy), when he gives his name as “Paul,” the already smirking cashier can barely contain her laughter.
He could be any handsome young man strolling the streets of Shoreditch. But he’s not. He’s someone who has already reached such a level of fame that his personal life is now under the intense microscope of social media, every sighting of him within arm’s length of a woman now fuel for relentless online speculation.
About his personal life, Mescal says, “The only power I have is to simply not talk about it.” So he doesn’t. He didn’t discuss his relationship with American singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, nor will he address his current relationship with American singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams. Photographs of Mescal and Abrams holding hands recently in London confirmed their pairing — at least if you trust the tabloids — but he’s not saying a word. And won’t read about it either.
“I’m not seeing the ‘Oh, Paul was talking to this person, blah di blah,” he says. “I think it’s a slippery slope to go down as I’m trying to retain any degree of sanity.” He deleted his public Instagram account a few years ago, but says he now has a private one, just for friends.
But the big question — the life-size, 3D printed and radio-controlled rhino in the room — is what life looks like after “Gladiator II.” There’s a difference between getting swooned over for your work in a quiet Irish TV drama and being the face of a massive Hollywood tentpole. Mescal pauses to consider the future.
“I’m 95% sure that things won’t get too crazy after this,” he says, a hint of uncertainty in his voice. The space from pre- to post-“Normal People,” he claims, “was the maddest part.” Nothing can top that, can it? “I have a sneaking suspicion that it won’t feel as steep after ‘Gladiator’ comes out. But I could be incredibly naive.”
But there’s potentially a point coming soon where we couldn’t, for example, sit here quietly drinking from cardboard cups on a London park bench, uninterrupted. Or where he can’t dance to Coldplay at Glastonbury with Ronan and Edgar-Jones, as he did last summer. Or where we won’t be able to experiencing the joy of a Mescal lookalike walking casually past. He reiterates his prediction. “It’s something I really don’t want to happen. And I’m 95% sure that’s not going to happen. But if it does, I’ll figure it out.”
There’s a sense he will. For all the zero-to-60 of the past four years, Mescal still sounds like an easygoing, levelheaded young lad. If anything can get him through what’s coming next, it’s that grounded personality.
He’s polite, friendly, thoughtful and unpretentious. He giggles and mocks himself one minute and eloquently philosophises about the importance of independent film the next. He swears, a lot. He says, “That’s gas!” about things he’s excited about. Like “Anora.” “I’d fucking love to work with Mikey Madison,” he exclaims. And “Wicked.” “I cannot wait to see that… I just love musicals.”
Crucially, Mescal is “not an arsehole,” says his “The Lost Daughter” co-star Olivia Colman. “He’s the opposite of that; he’s the sweetest, kindest, most thoughtful person, and is clearly very pretty.”
Ronan says she has discussed fame with Mescal — but claims “he’s too much a part of the real world to ever give it more importance than it deserves.” For his part, Mescal describes Ronan as “the benchmark” in terms of how to navigate it all. “She has a beautiful life of friends and family and continues to produce amazing work.”
A few weeks after we meet in London, I catch up with Mescal again, this time on the phone. He’s in Japan. The tour is in full swing, and the boy from Maynooth is everywhere. Giant billboards of him in his gladiator garb can be seen around the world, from Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing to L.A.’s Sunset Boulevard.
I ask again about how he’s feeling, as what’s left of his anonymity is whittled away. It sounds like he’s accepted his fate: Things are unlikely to go back to what they were; whatever privacy he had left is lost. “I’m aware that sometimes it’s the tax you pay if you do big films like this,” he says, “and I have zero regret in making ‘Gladiator.’”
But what about his prediction?
“Yeah, I think I’m going to drop that to 85%.”
Styling: Felicity Kay/The Wall Group; Grooming: Josh Knight/A-Frame Agency; Location: The Hollywood Roosevelt; Look 1 (bathtub): Suit, shirt, tie and shoes: Saint Laurent; Earring and chain: Cartier; Look 2 (cover): Shirts and trousers: Zegna; Earring and chain: Cartier; Look 3 (green curtain, tuxedo): Suit and shirt: Ferragamo; Earring, watch and chain: Cartier; Look 4 (lying in pages): Shirt, shoes and tie: Gucci; Sweater: Gimaguas; Trousers: Craig Green; Earring: Cartier
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