‘My script was better’: Nick Cave on his lost Gladiator sequel

Time travel, Christ killing, Maximus in Vietnam: the singer’s blockbuster vision seemed to have everything but the approval of Russell Crowe.

Nick Cave played a laser-firing gladiator in a video for his side project, Grinderman, in 2010. Paul Mescal stars in the version the studios chose. Picture montage: The Times

Gladiator II is the year’s most anticipated blockbuster. The new trailer for the film, a sequel to the Oscar-winning original, shows Paul Mescal fighting in the Colosseum against Pedro Pascal’s Marcus Acacius. There is a fight with a rhino and a dramatic battle at sea.

But it could have been so different had Nick Cave had his way, because in 2006 the musician wrote his own Gladiator sequel and sent it to Sir Ridley Scott, director of the original.

In Cave’s version, Maximus Decimus Meridius – the hero played by Russell Crowe in the first film – is tasked with killing Jesus Christ and travels through millennia taking part in other battles through history.

Neither Scott nor Crowe wanted to speak about the alternative script, but for the first time since revealing its existence Cave has delivered his own mischievous verdict on the sequel, due out this November. He told The Sunday Times: “I haven’t seen Gladiator II, but I guarantee my Gladiator script was better.”

Scott’s original film, released in 2000, was a sensation. It followed the life of a Roman general forced to become a slave and gladiator after his family was murdered by the twisted Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). Although Maximus eventually takes his revenge on the emperor (spoiler alert) he is ultimately slain and reunites with his wife and son in the afterlife. It grossed $US465 million worldwide and won five Oscars, including best picture and best actor for Crowe.

Six years later Crowe approached his close friend and fellow Australian, the gothic musician Cave. More famous for songs such as Red Right Hand, Cave had also enjoyed moderate success as a novelist and screenwriter. His first script, for an Australian western called The Proposition, starring Ray Winstone and John Hurt, had won awards including best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival.

Crowe asked Cave to write a Gladiator sequel which included Maximus, overcoming the small problem that his character had died.

“For someone who had only written one film script, it was quite an ask,” Cave told the WTF podcast in 2013.

Nick Cave and Russell Crowe in 2005, five years after the original Gladiator’s release. Picture: Getty Images

In his version, Maximus “goes to purgatory and is sent down by the gods who are dying in heaven … There’s this Christ character down on earth who is gaining popularity. So they send Gladiator back to kill Christ and all his followers. I wanted to call it Christ Killer. In the end you find out that the main guy was his son, so he has to kill his son. He becomes this eternal warrior and it ends with this 20-minute war sequence that follows all the wars of history right up to Vietnam. It was wild.”

Although the new script has little in common with Cave’s version, which was published online in 2009, some scenes bear similarities. In the trailer for Gladiator II, Mescal’s character, Lucius, can be seen pulling on the oar of a warship in a waterlogged Colosseum. In Cave’s script “the grounds of the arena have been flooded, and in 4ft of water, a naval battle ensues”.

In another, a dying rhino lies at the side of the road to the arena in Rome. In the 2024 script, written by David Scarpa, who also wrote the screenplay for Scott’s 2023 epic Napoleon, Lucius is forced into combat with the horned animal.

Unfortunately, when Cave presented his script to Crowe, he received a disappointingly blunt response: “Don’t like it, mate.” But Scott, according to Cave, “really, really liked it, but said it’s not gonna get made”.

He maintains that the script was a “stone-cold masterpiece”. However, he admitted it was always a long shot. “I enjoyed writing it very much. I enjoyed writing it because I knew on every level it was never going to get made.”

Paul Mescal plays Lucius and Pedro Pascal plays Marcus Acacius in Gladiator II from Paramount Pictures.

In recent years Crowe seems to have expressed frustration that he wasn’t involved in the new Gladiator film. Speaking on a panel at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in June last year, he said: “They should be f--king paying me for the amount of questions I get asked about the f--king film I am not even in.”

This month Mescal, 28, shared the intense fitness regime he undertook to play the film’s leading man, having said he didn’t want to look “more like an underwear model than a warrior”.

As a result his training was “focused on fight choreography … I just wanted to be big and strong and look like somebody who can cause a bit of damage.”

Cave, 66, releases an album next month called Wild God.

The Sunday Times