“The costume and props teams, they just brought me stuff: jewelry and sandals and everything. I looked like a Roman pimp, and I just loved it,” laughs Denzel Washington during a virtual press event for Gladiator II. “I couldn’t put on enough rings.  He needs more of everything ’cause he wants more of everything.”

Washington gives a baddie for the ages in Gladiator II as the power-hungry slave turned politician Macrinus. He steals every scene of the Ridley Scott’s sequel to the Oscar winning 2000 epic. But his performance is just one of many ways in which Scott’s flick ups the ante.

Scott admits that Washington’s performance surprised him and opened the story in ways he hadn’t expected. “The way he fussed with the silk—he kept doing this and doing that,” Scott says, mimicking the way Macrinus fondles his billowing garments, relishing the constant reminders of his hard-earned wealth.

The director says that following the original Gladiator was never far from his mind over the past 24 years while delivering epics and award winners like The Martian, House of Gucci, The Last Duel, and American Gangster. But he says it was simply a matter of finding a way to continue a story with a body count to rival the ending of Hamlet.

“The original created a life of its own, and then it started to get very global with all the platforms, and clearly it spelled itself out that we must have a sequel,” says Scott. “And why not?  Then, when you examine that and you sit around a table with my fellow producers and say, ‘What are we going to do,’ we examine the facts of who’s alive, whether it’s Connie [Nielsen], Lucilla, is alive. and the son mysteriously in the first one just disappeared, and so he seemed to be first target.”

Gladiator II follows Lucilla’s long lost son, Lucius, 20 years where the story left off. Played by Paul Mescal in a commanding, yet sensitive performance, Lucius returns to Rome when the African colony he defends is conquered by the Roman Empire. The capture lands him as one of Macrinus’s gladiators tasked with entertaining the masses through their furious bloodsport.

Mescal says he didn’t worry about the expectations of filling the sandals worn by Russell Crowe in Gladiator, who won an Oscar for his turn as General Maximus. Mescal notes that he drew from his experience doing A Streetcar Named Desire on stage and opted not to revisit Crowe’s iconic performance.

“I learned a lot from asking Ridley why he cast me, and the big clue that I got was that Ridley cast me because he saw Normal People and Aftersun,” says Mescal. “That immediately sent me down the line of ‘I don’t want to go and do a Russell Crowe on it because that’s his wheelhouse.’ I was trying to use the skills that I’ve learned from films that I love with all my heart: Aftersun and All of Us Strangers and Normal People. If I’m gonna stand behind this film in 10 years’ time and be proud of it, I’m going to be proud of it for the work that I did rather than trying to regurgitate a performance that was famous because of what he did.”

For his first major leading role, Mescal says he drew upon his experience playing rugby, but also leaned into the intensity that Washington brought to the set each day. “I grew up playing sports and I was captain for my school football team, so that [leadership] position isn’t alien to me.  It’s magnified by a hundred when you’re on a Ridley Scott set. Leading a film has nothing to do with talent.  It has to do with attitude,” he says. “You have to be the person who’s there first in the morning. And then working with Denzel and Ridley, I mean, in an acting context with Denzel, the thing that I found so inspiring and relaxing was that he’s not reinventing the wheel.”

Washington’s performance evokes the Roman Empire ancestor of, say, Alonzo Harris, his ferocious dirty cop from Training Day. It’s a uniquely anachronistic performance that nevertheless commands the screen by offering Mescal such a worthy foil. The actor is ambivalent when asked if it’s more fun to play the villain or the hero.

“I don’t know ’cause I don’t look at it that way,” observes Washington. “It’s what a person wants. What their desires are.  I have to look at what they’ve been through. The screenplay doesn’t talk about what happened to him. How he was exploited.  How he was abused.  I’m not making excuses, but that’s the actor’s work. That’s why they call it building a character.”

“I’ve never worked with an actor who brings the level of intensity to a set that he does,” Mescal says of Washington. “I think for a film like Gladiator II, there are many parts to Denzel’s performance, but there’s two parts that I think are pretty distinct in the film: his relationship to the political world that he’s manipulating, and that’s quite Machiavellian and light and dexterous. But he doesn’t have to play those things with me because I’m his subject.”

For Mescal, moreover, holding his own as an action star let him flex his muscles literally and figuratively in the film’s epic action sequences, which include a climatic sword fight with Washington. “It’s like I think comfort for an actor is death. I generally know how an independent single camera shoot works. I know what the rhythm of that is,” says Mescal. “So to go into a Ridley film, I was like, ‘I don’t have a clue what this rhythm is.’ It brings you back to your instincts.  It brings you back to that feeling of being in drama school and not knowing if you can act.  Ridley always talks about putting actors in as creatives on thin ice consciously, which, I think, is a really useful place to put yourself from time to time.”

Scott, meanwhile, says the biggest challenge of returning to the Gladiator arena was working with the giant leaps in visual effects and stunt choreography. “Most fight scenes that are done today, you’d never get up from one of those punches,” says Scott. “It’s kind of ridiculous.  When he’s hit 19 times, you’d probably be dead, so I like to keep my fight scenes as I did in Black Hawk Down: real.  The key is when you start using visual effects to survive an explosion, which should be frankly impossible, you have no skin left on your body. I like to try and keep it as real as possible.”

The punches in Gladiator feel as real as ever and, yes: it entertains.

Gladiator II is now playing in theatres.