It has arrived late, but in a forceful way. One year after the premiere of Gladiator IIthe actor (New Zealand, 61 years old) has finally given his opinion on the second part of the film that elevated his career, the continuation of a story in which he did not participate (and now we know why) by recording any scenes. The person who gave life to General Máximo Meridio in the film directed in 2000 by Ridley Scott has expressed his reluctance with the production with which the British director gave continuity – somewhat forced – to his story, through an illegitimate son – Lucius Verus, played by – that the soldier had with Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), daughter of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, while he avenged the death of his wife.
He did so during an intervention on the Australian radio station Triple J., in which, as can be seen on his social networks, he explained his problems with Scott’s sequel. Crowe, who did not want to film any scenes for Gladiator II Although his character is part of the story – although he has already died – he assures that he did not agree with the initial premise. If in the 2000 film the main plot focused on avenging the death of his wife, the actor does not conceive of the script twist of the second part: “I think that the recent sequel, which we do not have to mention too highly, is an unfortunate example that, even in the engine room team, there were those who did not really understand what made the first film special. It was not the pomp, it was not the circumstances, it was not the action. It was the moral essence,” he expressed in the interview.
Crowe has thus continued his defense of the character for which he won an Oscar for best actor: “There was a daily fight in the set to protect that moral essence of the character [en la primera película]. The number of times someone suggested a sex scene or things like that to Máximo it was like, ‘You’re stripping him of his power.’ Are you telling me that while he had that relationship with his wife [en referencia a la venganza] Was he fucking someone else? It’s crazy. When the movie came out, women in Europe would come up to me in a restaurant and ask me what was going on. And I was like: ‘It’s not me, I didn’t do it!’
In line with what the protagonist of the first film has now said, he expressed himself in November 2024 about the sequel that has just been released: “Here strength and honor are non-existent, the script is as crazy as it is involuntarily comic, foolishly predictable, without the slightest magnetism in what counts,” he wrote about a very expensive production that, on the other hand, does not share a team of scriptwriters with the original (and that did not have the same support at the box office either).
For his part, Crowe released another historical film last November, in which he plays Hermann Göring, the highest official of the Third Reich taken prisoner. The film is an approach to the historic trial of the Nazi leadership after the end of World War II through Douglas Kelley, the psychiatrist who evaluated the mental health of those leaders before putting them in the dock.
