Denzel Washington on His ‘Gladiator II’ Role: “I’m Putting This Dress On, These Rings, and I’m Going Crazy”

At a special screening on the Paramount lot on Friday, Gladiator II stars Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, Connie Nielsen and Fred Hechinger offered a first look at their new film and opened up about their experiences working on Ridley Scott‘s sequel.

The film sees Mescal playing a grown-up Lucius Verus II, a nephew of emperor Commodus from the original film played by Joaquin Phoenix. Lucius returns to Rome after being forced into slavery to battle not as a ruler but as a gladiator out for revenge and power, seeking to return the glory of Rome to its people.

“I suppose Lucius represented something to me that I had never done before, like somebody who is quite front-footed through the two-and-a-half hours,” Mescal said of taking on the lead role. “I hadn’t gotten to do that before, and it’s something that has been kind of latently within me, something that’s more full of something that people haven’t seen.”

Washington also has a prominent part in the film as Macrinus, a wealthy arms dealer and former gladiator who plots to control Rome. The actor joked during the Q&A, “He’s misunderstood. He’s a nice fellow.”

“He’s trying to use everybody. He’d use his mother, he’d use his own children; he’s already used up his soul, so he didn’t have any left. He’s in bed with the devil,” Washington continued, explaining that Scott made their work easy by building life-size sets as they shot in Malta. “When you would walk around, you were in Rome, and it seemed like 10,000 extras and horses. It was make-believe, it was play, it was fun; just put the gear on, put the dress on and go, that’s the way I look at it. I’m putting this dress on, these rings and I’m going crazy.”

Mescal also touched on both his physical and emotional transformation for his character, joking that he had “this naive idea at the start where I was like, ‘I’m maybe gonna just play a gladiator that kind of looks normal.’” He later realized, “I always saw him like a dog, like somebody who would just scrap his way to survival” who, for most of the film, “doesn’t really care if he lives or dies.”

The Normal People star told a story about how on the first day of shooting he was sitting in the production tent when Scott came in with a cigar. “I was absolutely shitting myself, and he looks at me, he goes, ‘You nervous?’ And I didn’t know what the appropriate answer was so I was like, ‘Eh.’ He’s like, ‘Your nerves are no fucking good to me.’ Marches out, cameras are turning over,” Mescal recalled to laughs from the crowd.

To finish out the conversation, Mescal noted that the sequel, coming 24 years after the original, “wears the legacy of the first film with intense pride and honor, but I think it takes it in a direction that drives that honor and respect through the roof.”

“I think it’s made by the only man who could ever touch it, in Ridley Scott, and personally, as his friend and his long admirer, I think it’s one of his finest pieces of work that I’ve seen in recent times,” the actor added. “I’m so utterly proud of his work, my work, and everybody sitting here and everybody who’s not sitting here. I don’t think anybody can take that away from us.”

Gladiator II hits theaters on Nov. 22.