Paul Mescal’s Road to ‘Gladiator II’: Rejecting ‘Big Studio Franchise-y’ Offers, Convincing Ridley Scott to Let Him Do His Own Stunts and More

variety.com:

Paul Mescal, eight men in short shorts walk past on the street. It may be a surprisingly sunny late September morning in London, but it’s cold — not the weather for exposed thighs — and these gentlemen don’t look like they’re out for a jog. “I have noticed certain similarities in certain specific boroughs of London,” Mescal says upon his arrival, when I ask if he’s spotted any lookalikes on his travels.

He’s smirking, quite possibly because a man sporting Mescal short shorts, Mescal scruffy facial hair and a little Mescal mullet has just strolled past us with the sort of comic timing a director would have required several takes to get so precisely. “For the record, I don’t think I’m responsible,” he says of the upsurge in short shorts, arguing that he’s merely dressing the same as the vast majority of Irishmen who play Gaelic Athletic Association football.

Few are convinced. “He’s somehow managed to make something that’s not really cool look really cool,” says close friend and “Foe” co-star Saoirse Ronan. “And when he paired it with the mullet and mustache a couple of years ago, I was like, ‘OK, this is either gonna go one way or the other.’” We’re now year four into the Paul Mescal-ification of the Western world, and we know which way it’s going.

But thanks to 86-year-old filmmaking legend Ridley Scott and several legions of Roman soldiers in togas, Mescal is about to see whether he has the legs to be a Hollywood blockbuster leading man in “Gladiator II,” which Paramount Pictures opens in theaters on Nov.