Russell Crowe was to be resurrected in Nick Cave’s cancelled ‘Gladiator’ sequel

nme.com:

Russell Crowe was meant to reprise his role in Nick Cave‘s cancelled Gladiator sequel, director Ridley Scott has revealed.In the 2000 epic, Crowe portrayed Maximus, a Roman general turned brave Colosseum fighter who expires at the end of the film.

However, according to Ridley Scott, Crowe wanted to be brought back for a planned sequel, which was at the time being penned by musician Nick Cave.Scott recalled to PEOPLE: “Russell and I had a go at it around 18 years ago.

I had Nick Cave writing the script and I kept saying [to Russell], ‘But you’re dead.’ And he said, ‘I know I’m dead. And I want to come back from the dead.'”Scott then said that Cave’s workaround for resurrecting Crowe’s Maximus was through “a portal”: “The only way of doing it was to go to another battle and through a dying warrior, he comes back into the spirit of the warrior.

So that’s his portal.”However, Crowe reportedly rebuked the idea because it would mean a different actor will be playing the resurrected version of Maximus: “He said, ‘So that’s no fucking good, is it?’ It didn’t really work.”Per a 2018 report from the BBC, Nick Cave’s Gladiator II would have opened with Maximus in the afterlife, where he meets several fallen Roman deities.