[Note: This article contains spoilers for Gladiator II.]

Two Bentleys. That’s what was on the line for Paul Mescal while filming Gladiator II’s climactic finale, in which all hell breaks loose: Denzel Washington’s Macrinus has made his final murderous break for power over Rome, and as Lucius (Mescal) flees the Colosseum in pursuit, he leaps onto a running horse in one swift motion—a stunt Mescal had to bargain with Sir Ridley Scott to let him do.

“In the weeks leading up to the shoot, Ridley was like, ‘There’s no fucking way you’re doing that,’” Mescal tells me. “If you come off the horse, we’re fucked.”

Having rehearsed the stunt for “months and months and months,” Mescal was devastated. “I pestered him day in, day out. He was like, ‘There’s no way that’s happening.’ And then on the day before the stunt, I asked him, fully expecting him to still say no, and he looked at me, and he goes, ‘If you come off the horse, you owe me two Bentleys.’ I was like, ‘We’re doing this.’” Mescal, evidently, survived. “I didn’t think much about the Bentleys, and then we did two takes of it. That was a full adrenaline rush.”

Scott may be two Bentleys short, but with Gladiator II now storming the box office worldwide, the veteran director is likely unfazed—and Letterboxd are not taking the new blockbuster from the 87-year-old titan of cinema for granted. As SchnieboJr writes: “Sir Ridley Scott is operating on a whole other level… The exhilarating, brutal action sequences, the grand production design, the stunning cinematography, the wondrous score—everything works hand in hand to create this immersive world.” Or as SkyfallAxiom713 puts it: “There were mutant monkeys and sharks in the Colosseum, what more could you ask for? Ridley, you mad lad, you’ve done it again.”

Set roughly twenty years after the events of Gladiator, the sequel opens as Lucius—the grown-up son of Lucilla (Connie

Nielsen) and Maximus (Russell Crowe)—is taken as a slave and forced to fight in the Colosseum after his home city of Numidia is conquered by Rome. With Scott amplifying the grandeur of the gladiator scenes this time—Lucius grapples with feral baboons, charging rhinoceroses and a flooded, shark-infested arena—Gladiator II expands on its predecessor’s themes of greed and corruption, spectacle as a political tool, and the nobility and mythology of death in the Roman Empire.

Below, the cast of Gladiator II unpack five key elements of the film’s Shakespearean journey, from Mescal’s newfound rage to the dangerous pursuit of absolute power.

“I didn’t think it made sense for him to be in that position,” Mescal continues. “It’s a moment where they’re looking to someone to speak, so he just goes, ‘Okay, forget about being heroes out here. Just survive so you can live to see the next day.’”

Whether Lucius likes it or not, the naval battle, an exhilarating set piece with exploding ships and bloodthirsty sharks, thrusts him into a leadership position. “You see him get onto the boat, and he suddenly is at the till, and he accepts that his role in this moment is to guide his men to victory, and it’s a wonderful theater to do that in,” says Mescal. “Visually, I think that’s Ridley at his best, where he’s playing with an idea and magnifying it by a hundred.”

Lucius’s transformation from bullish rage to methodical leader allowed Mescal to chew into a full spectrum of rage—an emotion he felt remained untapped in his career to date. “A lot of the rage that I would have felt with other characters would have been very much internalized, and this is a character who, what he’s feeling lives on the surface,” he says. “As an actor, it’s not so much about the success of how those things land with an audience. It’s about pushing myself, and there’s something more traditionally ‘leading man’ about this part that is fundamentally challenging, because I haven’t done a lot of that.”

His decompression routine after fight scenes? “A sports massage and a stiff drink.”

The Machiavellian Mind

For Rome to need heroes, it needs villains. Enter Geta and Caracalla, Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger’s maniacal twin emperors, and, of course, Washington’s Macrinus, whose plan to usurp the twins is driven by his own cunning desperation for absolute power. For many Letterboxd , these performances are Gladiator II’s secret weapons: Quinn and Hechinger are “vicious fun,” “tyrannical and despicable,” and “devilishly entertaining,” while Washington is “utterly mesmerizing,” “predictably outstanding,” and “steals every scene with his swagger and commanding presence.”

Quinn and Hechinger were delighted to develop their villainy in tandem. “Mania and petulance, I don’t need to dig too far in my soul for,” jokes Quinn. “Watching Fred work would inform whatever choice I thought I should explore, and because there’s this kind of symbiosis, this codependence, they’re moving on the same frequency… the layers of entitlement and tyranny would reveal itself as we got further and further down the rabbit hole.”

Meanwhile, Macrinus, a former slave turned opulent arms dealer, is driven by “his desire to not be where he was forced to be, and do what he was forced to do, but to impose that on others,” says Washington. “He wants it all, [and] he’s willing to do anything to get it.” In Gladiator II, compared with Shakespearean stories of moral decline, Macrinus leaves them in the dust, says Washington. “He’d eat Hamlet if he wanted to, or needed to. Or kill him. Or sleep with him.”

Hechinger tried not to let the iconography of the original become a distraction. “When something moves you a lot and it means so much to you, which is true of Gladiator for us and for so many other people, it’s still with that distance,” he explains. “At the end of the day, that love is a kind of bedrock, but you have to throw it out the window, too. The only way I really know how to find something is inside out, [and] sometimes… an awareness of trademark or iconography is kind of stifling.”

For Pedro Pascal, his character Marcus Acacius’s love for Lucilla—one of the few recurring characters from the first film—was an entry point into the story he relished. “I couldn’t not think about the context of what my character meant as a sort of connecting tissue through Lucilla,” Pascal reflects. “I felt the excitement of being able to play a character that was so specifically and directly related to the first movie through her character, so that helped me understand and bring dimension to what the relationship is, to his identity as a general. But who he really is serving is one person, and that’s her, and his value system is built through her lens.”

“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.”

“The spectacle of that, with the horses coming down—you have these two characters who have been at the center of it for an audience, and you feel them facing off. When I watched it for the first time, you feel a real desire for these two to have it out,” says Mescal.

“That fight in particular is really well-choreographed. It’s almost like a three-act play of a fight, and getting to go toe-to-toe with Denzel in a context like that is absolutely mind-blowing,” he continues. “But thematically, then to come out of the water—that’s the moment when [Lucius] goes, ‘Okay, whether I like this or not, I’ve got to step into this position of leadership.’”

Despite the scene requiring fight choreography in the water with heavy, armored costumes, Washington was unfazed. “I was just in there doing what we wanted to do, the way [Scott] wanted us to do it.”

Any challenges? “No challenges,” says the two-time Oscar winner. “I can fight, wet or dry.”