Russell Crowe shares thoughts on 'uncomfortable' Gladiator sequel after having 'no say in what goes on'

If you think of the movie Gladiator then your mind is likely to go to Russell Crowe's Roman general Maximus, husband to a murdered wife and father to a murdered child.

Audiences were dazzled by his quest to have his vengeance in this life or the next, though the movie ended with him being very definitely dead.

Put up against cruel Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) in the Colosseum, Maximus is intentionally wounded before the fight to hamper him, but he still manages to slay the emperor before succumbing and we see him reuniting with his wife and son in the afterlife.

That's about as dead as dead gets for a character in a film, so when Gladiator 2 was announced it seemed quite clear that Maximus wasn't going to fight his way out of the afterlife and snap back to reality in the real world.

The Gladiator sequel was originally supposed to release 'early in 2024' but we've already had that and it hasn't come, so now it'll release near the end of it instead on 22 November.

Russell Crowe has said the first Gladiator movie opened doors for him. (Pool Insabato Rovaris/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)

Russell Crowe has been speaking about the upcoming sequel, and told the Kyle Meredith With... podcast that he was 'slightly uncomfortable' with them doing a sequel when his character is too dead to participate.

He said: "I'm slightly uncomfortable with the fact they're making another one - because, of course, [Maximus is] dead and I have no say in what gets done.

"But a couple of the things that I've heard I'm like, 'Oh, no, no, no, that's not in the moral journey of that particular character.'

"But I can't say anything, it's not my place, I'm six foot under. So we'll see what that is like.

"I reflect back, the age I was when I made that film and all the things that came after it, the doors that particular movie opened for me.

"This is just me being purely honest: there's definitely a tinge of melancholy, a tinge of jealousy. I remember when I had tendons."

The 60-year-old has joked in the past that he's feeling just a smidge jealous of the Gladiator sequel because the film was so important to his career in younger days.

It sounds like there's no Russell Crowe in the Gladiator sequel, but he thinks the plot of the movie is 'a very smart idea'. (DreamWorks Pictures)

Connie Nielsen and Derek Jacobi are returning to their roles as Lucilla and Senator Gracchus, and Crowe said he'd heard the film was going to be about Lucius, the young boy who was nephew to Commodus in the first film.

Maximus himself said he thought that was 'a very smart idea', so even if he's a little bit jealous that he can't be part of the fun this time around it seems to largely have Crowe's approval.

This time around Paul Mescal will play Lucius, who will be the leading star of the film, while Joseph Quinn seems set to be Gladiator 2's villain this time around as co-Emperor Caracalla.

As with the original Gladiator they're playing a bit loose with the history, as Commodus and Caracalla were real people who were perhaps not quite as Ridley Scott portrayed them, though both did have a historical reputation for cruelty.

The real Commodus was strangled to death in his bath by a wrestler, while Caracalla was stabbed while taking a p**s.

Over the years a number of potential sequel ideas to Gladiator had been mooted, including ideas of how to bring Russell Crowe back, including a crazy idea where Maximus would be brought back to life to 'kill Christ and his followers'.

It's probably for the best they didn't make that one.