Russell Crowe on ‘Gladiator 2’: ‘Slightly jealous’

Jordan Hoffman
·3 min read
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Russell Crowe, the 59-year-old New Zealand-born Oscar-winning actor, admitted in a recent interview that he’s following news of Sir Ridley Scott crewing up for a “Gladiator” sequel just like the rest of us. 

He said he has no inside track for what to expect, but paid his former director a nice compliment, saying, “One of the positives about it, for sure, is that it is Ridley because he’s going to want to go back into that world and create something [on] the same level of spectacle as the first one.”

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Then he gave us a peek into his human side, saying what I imagine any one of us would feel if we were in his position. “The only thing that I really feel about it is slightly jealous, you know?” he quipped. 

“Because I was a much younger man, obviously,” he continued, “and it was a huge experience in my life. It’s something that changed my life, really. It changed the way people regarded me and what I do for a living, and, you know, I’ve been very lucky to be involved in lots of big movies, but the legs on that film are incredible. Here it is, it’s 2023, and we made that film in 1999. I guarantee you, somewhere around the world tonight, Gladiator is going to be showing on primetime TV. And you don’t always get that kind of longevity with every film you do, so, it obviously holds a special place in my heart.”

Alas, Crowe’s character, Maximus Decimus Meridius, ended the 2000 release by entering the Elysian Fields. The upcoming picture stars Paul Mescal as Lucius, the nephew of Joaquin Phoenix’s villain character who looked up to Crowe’s character Maximus. Maximus was an item with Lucius’s mother, the recently widowed Lucilla, played by Connie Nielsen; it was all over Page Sextus at the time. 

Word is that Barry Keoghan is also in the film, playing Emperor Publius Septimus Geta. Don’t look that name up on Wikipedia unless you want the (possible) ending of the movie spoiled. Denzel Washington, who worked with Crowe on Scott’s “American Gangster,” also reportedly has a role.

The 85-year-old director-producer Scott is bringing back many from the original production, including cinematographer John Mathieson, production designer Arthur Max and Oscar-winning costume designer Janty Yates. It being Rome, it wouldn’t be completely absurd for Crowe’s character to make an appearance should a character pay a visit to a vapor-mad oracle in some cave in the hope to commune with the past. This would probably make history scholars turn pale, but most moviegoers would get a kick out of it.

The original “Gladiator” ended up with 12 Academy Award nominations and five wins: Best Picture, Best Actor (Crowe), Best Costume Design (Yates), Best Sound, and Best Visual Effects, and was a box office sensation grossing $456 million worldwide.

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