It’s Mescal vs Pascal in the first Gladiator II trailer
The first look at Ridley Scott’s follow-up to his 2000 Oscar-dominating epic is here | WATCH
Ready your chariots— the first trailer for Gladiator II, Ridley Scott’s hotly anticipated sequel to his 2000 Oscar-dominating epic, is finally here.
The film, set for release in November, picks up in the years after Russell Crowe’s Maximus gave his life, upending the decadent, corrupt rule of Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus.
Paul Mescal, the Irish actor best known for his breakout role in the BBC television series Normal People and his Oscar-nominated turn in Aftersun, will play the central character Lucius, last seen as the young son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, who has reprised her role), the noblewoman from the 2000 movie.
Lucius, once the grandson of the emperor of Rome, is now a prisoner of it— and vows to defeat its new primping emperors, Caracalla (Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn) and Geta (Fred Hechinger).
Also joining Gladiator II is Pedro Pascal, star of The Last of Us, who plays General Marcus Acacius, a Roman general rumored to have trained under Crowe’s character, according to Vanity Fair, although unseen in the original film. And Denzel Washington, rocking hooped earrings and reprising his iconic Training Day laugh as the slave owner and power broker Macrinus, whom Scott has described as ‘pretty f---ing cruel’ to the arena fighters.
Those itching to hear Hans Zimmer’s thunderous orchestral score once more should prepare for disappointment. There are no sweeping strings or haunting woodwind motifs here; no, the marketing team has taken a leaf out of Baz Luhrmann’s book and, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, decided to soundtrack the trailer with a reworking of ‘No Church in the Wild’ by Kanye West and Jay Z, a song that opens with the lyrics: “Tears on the mausoleum floor / Blood stains the Colosseum doors.”
Woefully misjudged needle drop aside, the trailer looks every bit as lush and epic as you’d expect from a Scott production — with plenty of action, spectacle, and a rhinocerous fight scene that Scott has has been envisioning for decades.
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