This Weekend's Hunk: Paul Mescal Bulked Up for the Arena in 'Gladiator II'

Move over Elphaba and Galinda. You may be defying box office gravity this weekend, but another actor is throwing his new weight around. Quite literally. That's Paul Mescal, who is surprising fans with his bulked up physique in Ridley Scott's "Gladiator II" that also opened this weekend.

Some cagy film marketers are pairing the films together in hope for the same box office synergy that made super hits of "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" (remember "Barbenheimer"), calling it "Glicked" (a two-syllable word that rhymes with "Wicked"). According to Deadline, first weekend projections for both films suggest it may happen with "Wicked" projected to make $120M for the three days and "Gladiator II" $61M with the audiences clearly showing a battle of the sexes: it was estimated that 71% of women made up "Wicked's" Friday night audience, while "Gladiator II" brought in 61% of men at Thursday's screening.

The break-out star for "Gladiator II" is turning out to be Mescal, the 28-year old Irish actor who has built quite a resume in a short period of time. He first attracted attention for the 2020 miniseries "Normal People," for which he won a BAFTA Award and received an Emmy nomination. He appeared in two independent dramas, "The Lost Daughter" (2021) and "God's Creatures" (2022). His next two roles brought him more acting honors, as the troubled dad in "Aftersun" (an Oscar nom for Best Actor) and a London queer man in "All of Us Strangers" (A BAFTA nom for Best Actor.)

His latest two roles amp up the masculinity quotient considerably. First he won an Olivier Award for playing Tennessee Williams' alpha male Stanley Kowalski in a 2022 revival of the play "A Streetcar Named Desire" in London. He repeats the role in New York City next year. Then he bulked up for "Gladiator II," in which he plays Lucius, a warrior fighting to defend his North African homeland from the invading Romans. (The film takes place some 16 years after the original.) He is made prisoner and shipped to Rome where he catches the eye of a gladiator wrangler (Denzel Washington) who buys Lucius to fight in the Coliseum.

In reviewing the film in the New York Times, Manhola Dargis points out that how the bulked-up Mescal appears to have unease with his body and uses it to his advantage in his performance. "Mescal has bulked up considerably for 'Gladiator II' and doesn't seem altogether comfortable with his newly jacked body, an unease that works for his character's psychological and physical vulnerability. He doesn't have (Russell) Crowe's natural swagger; he holds you more stealthily."

According to GQ, Mescal got the call from Ridley Scott for the film while appearing in "Streetcar" in the West End. There was one problem: he only had 12-weeks to get in shape. "Mescal reached out to Tim Blakely, a Navy man-turned-bodybuilder and PT to the stars. Not only does Blakely have prior experience getting the likes of John Boyega and Gerard Butler in shape, his Media Physiques gym was a convenient walk from where Mescal was on stage six nights a week."

But when they first met, there was an awkward moment, Entertainment Weekly reports. ""He comes to the hotel and he's like, 'Can we go up to your room?' Mescal said Wednesday in an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. 'I'm like, 'Yeah, that sounds good.' And he goes, 'Into your underwear, please.' And I'm like, 'This is how this works. OK.' So I'm like [standing] there in my underwear, and he's just kind of like circling me and, like, doing his, like, mental... basically, just doing, like, looking at my body scientifically."

Mescal said there was then intense silence.

"And he's just looking at me with his head cocked," the actor said, "and he goes, 'There's a canvas with which to work here.'"

For the next 12 weeks Blakely worked on that canvas. "I was on stage at the time, which was really useful because you get days to yourself," he told Colbert. And he recalls a diet consisting mostly of one item: "all of the chicken imaginable." But, Blakely added, there was also the usual good stuff: eggs, chicken, beef, rice, fish and so on.

There was, though, one cavaet: "There were some negotiations with Paul," Blakely told GQ. "At the start he said 'I warn you, I do drink and I do smoke. He realized he would have to curtail that, but he wanted to work in times he could have a few drinks here and there."

"Despite the odd pint and cig, Blakely calls Mescal a 'dream client' enthusing that he was never late, was always committed, and always left his phone in the locker room. In fact, he became such an exercise aficionado that Blakely remembers Mescal correcting his brother's form when the three would train together.

"One quirk was that Mescal needed to know how torturous the workouts would be in advance. '"'Paul's brain needs to know what he's got to do before he starts,' laughs Blakely. 'There'd be a five minute negotiation of what we're going to do and how much we're going to do each session, and once he's got that in his head it's literally head down and get it done.'"

In her rave review, The Times' Dargis calls the film "one long, inventively diverse, elaborately imaginative fight," a sentiment that Mescal agrees with while speaking with Colbert.

"I loved how distinct the fights are from each other, and what I'm really proud of is how you can feel the cumulation of the violence on his body as the film progresses. The fights aren't like slick swordplay," he said. "You can feel towards the end what Lucius says – it's about survival. It's like your body's going to accumulate all this punishment. And it's about holding onto that as the film progresses. And I think it's much more interesting to see somebody who psychologically has an aptitude for survival rather than somebody who's innately skilled. And I think Lucius just has a dog in him that will perpetually survive environments that other people shouldn't. So I'm proud of them all in different ways."

But, he adds, he's no longer as fit as he was for the arena. "Oh, how the mighty have fallen," he joked to Colbert. "This is not what it's like here at the moment, unfortunately."