Gladiator II’s main returning star Connie Nielsen has revealed that what was written for her character in the sequel left her ‘wide-eyed’ and with her jaw on the floor.
The Danish actress, 59, played Lucilla, daughter of emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) in the original Gladiator film from 24 years ago, who is shockingly killed by his own son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix).
Harbouring a connection with Russell Crowe’s Maximus, who dies in her arms in the gladiatorial arena of the Colosseum at the end of that movie, the long-suspected fan theory that her son Lucius is also his was confirmed in the trailer for Gladiator II.
But with Lucius (Paul Mescal) sent away for his safety back then and Rome now under the rule of debauched co-emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), and scheming arms dealer and gladiator owner Macrinus (Denzel Washington) chasing power, her position is more precarious than it once was – especially when Lucius returns as an enslaved gladiator after his home in Numidia was conquered by Rome.
A sequel to Gladiator has been on director Sir Ridley Scott’s mind for years, but the first Nielsen knew of it really happening was when the story from David Scarpa and Peter Craig was finally selected by him.
‘They finally figured out what they exactly wanted the story to be. Ridley did lot of different iterations until he happened upon the one that he really loved and that’s when they contacted me to ask if I would be willing to come back and reprise Lucilla,’ she tells ahead of the film’s global premiere in London.
Nielsen is in fact not the only returner to a cast that also includes Pedro Pascal, as renowned British thespian Sir Derek Jacobi, 86, is also back as Senator Gracchus.
However, her part this time seems even more crucial, given her connection to Pascal’s General Marcus Acacius, who commanded his troops to slaughter warriors during the capture of Numidia – including Lucius’s wife. He is also Lucilla’s husband, which creates an even more impossible scenario for her.
‘I honestly could not have imagined the incredible plot points that she would be at the centre of,’ shares Nielsen when discussing what her hopes were for her character’s return.
‘I really was just completely – just wide eyed, open, just astonished as I was reading the script,’ she adds of Lucilla’s divided loyalties, alongside her ambition to restore Rome to its former stability.
‘I was just so looking forward to doing some of these scenes – very heartbreaking as well,’ she adds in what is zero overstatement.
She laughs a ‘thank you’ when it’s suggested she’s the secret weapon of Gladiator, given Lucilla’s significance in both films.
But she was also able to shrug off any worries about coming back to reprise a role she had not played in almost a quarter of a century, claiming to not feel ‘any pressure’ about returning and connecting with Lucilla.
‘I really felt it was such an organic and natural experience. I felt her, definitely – I remembered the feeling inside of me, of her, and finding her again was so simple and so easy.’
The Wonder Woman star also highlights how lovely it was to sink her teeth into ‘the incredible challenges she brought with her and that she had the context of what she had seen over the past 18 years’.
‘That was so inspiring to kind of build that into the character, imagining how the daughter of Marcus Aurelius would have felt watching the complete descent into madness of a country that had, at her father’s time, been at its very apex.’
Looking to the new generation of Gladiator talent and Nielsen is full of praise for her 28-year-old onscreen son Mescal, who is ‘such a wonderful actor, just absolutely brilliant’.
‘I was looking very much forward to doing scenes with him,’ she said of the Oscar nominee. ‘And when we did get to the scenes, it was really so special to go in there and I could just feel that they were going to be very strong.’
As someone in the unusual position of making a follow-up film over two decades after the first one, and even returning to Malta for the shoot and acting in a replica Colosseum rebuilt in the same location – Fort Ricasoli – as before, Nielsen must also have been struck by how much had changed in the moviemaking process during the intervening years.
But for her, it also meant she was in danger of losing one of her favourite aspects of shooting a film, and part of her process with Alien and Blade Runner’s Sir Ridley.
‘He’s such a collaborative director, and it’s such a pleasure for an actor to actually have all these conversations with him about where the character should go,’ she recalls. ‘And back in the day, it took sometimes hours to move all of those cameras around and have the new camera rolls put on – and the little magazine had to be checked and the air had to be thrown into the mix in order to make sure there were no little bits over the film…’
However, with the advances in technology, it ‘now it takes no time at all’, meaning ‘so much less time to sit there and have all of these amazing conversations with Ridley’, she laments.
But Nielsen had a sweet way of making sure she didn’t have to miss out on this valuable part of the experience with the storied 86-year-old director.
‘I just made up my mind that I would do it in the morning instead! And so, every morning, I would pop myself outside his door and look forward to us talking about the scenes and where we wanted to go with it,’ the actress smiles.
‘And that way, when we were on set, we were ready, because the set was always ready for us.’