Watching the newly released trailer for Gladiator 2 – a deeply unnecessary sequel to Ridley Scott’s infamous year 2000 film starring Russell Crowe – one thing is clear. This is a film about men. It’s also, to all intents and purposes and with no gender-normative offence intended, a film for men: a film about honour, and biceps, and not going to the doctors until you are literally on death’s door; a film in which ships get set on fire, women speak only in seductive whispers and there is a great deal of time dedicated to shouting “AAAAAAAAAARGH!”, often with a sword held aloft. If, like me, you have ever sat through a similar affair during the mind-numbing period between Christmas and New Year and had it dawn on you that this is why your boyfriend thinks about the Roman Empire while you, having spent your life watching Richard Curtis, have spent the equivalent time pondering your attachment style, you will know exactly what kind of film I’m talking about.
Yet Gladiator 2 also stars Paul Mescal – an actor who has become known for his soft masculinity, and thus also a cult sex symbol. Gladiators, though, are not known for their softness or sensitivity. They are known for chopping people’s heads off and taming lions (or, in this case, riding rhinos). And so Paul Mescal may be about to transition from – to borrow a phrase from another icon of subversive machismo, Mike Skinner – cult classic to bestseller.
Since Mescal starred in the BBC’s adaptation of Normal People in 2020 as Connell, a sensitive working-class lad who had learned to cover his emotions with bravado but who was liberated in a relationship with beautiful, nerdy Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones), straight women everywhere have found themselves weak-kneed at just the mention of his name. Various props have helped him on this journey to becoming an “I can fix him” god, including but not limited to the show’s lengthy and unguarded sex scenes, the neck chain he wore in those scenes, a corner shop bottle of Crabbie’s alcoholic ginger beer, several public outings in tiny shorts, a real-life relationship with the indie musician Phoebe Bridgers, a gig advertising Gucci loafers, and the fact that he is Irish.
Since then, having starred in Aftersun as a single dad and a love interest in gay romance All of Us Strangers alongside Andrew Scott, Mescal has cemented his status as a pin-up of an emotionally intelligent, and also fundamentally hot, man, and therefore an object of female lust. It is relatively rare for a celebrity to appear to embody both the slightly feminine personality traits that we so crave – such as the ability to sob on camera – and also the traditionally masculine physicality that insidiously impacts the body image of half the population – rugged features, cheeky smile and being built like a brick shithouse. Mescal has this lethal combination – and did I mention that he’s Irish?
Compounding all this is the fact that, surely helped along by his now past relationship with Bridgers, Mescal has also maintained a certain edge. He has leaned firmly into an urbane aesthetic (see: cigarettes, mullet, Glastonbury attendance, those shorts, again) that has cemented him as a kind of everyman for people with an architecture degree, and a “whatshisname from that show about sex” for people with a car.
This type of fame meant that, as he told GQ in 2022, people asked him for photos “relatively infrequently”, and he doesn’t mind (told you he was nice), but that occasionally someone would be unpleasant. “The classic is like, a drunk fucking dude coming up to me and being like, ‘My girlfriend really fucking loved the show,’” he said. “And I’m like… You don’t need to be ashamed that you watched a television show, dude.”
Now, with a lead role in the sequel to one of the biggest – and most male – movies of this century, that is about to change. The girlfriends are not going to be the ones loving this, let me tell you. In channelling the kind of macho that straight men understand – which, in the movies, usually seems to involve having a dirty face and saying “who are you” to a stranger in a dungeon in a voice so deep and gruff it’s almost inaudible, all of which is of course part of the journey towards becoming the warrior king of the wooded realm, or the world, or the galaxy, or whatever – Gladiator 2 is about to make Paul Mescal a household name.
While that’s a shame for all the Guinness-drinking, fourth-wave-coffee brewing legends who will brag that they’ve fancied him since before he was famous, at least the boyfriends will be less confused when women continue to cite him as their dream shag. Human psychology be damned: the Roman Empire has never seemed more interesting.