Paul Mescal can thank a few excitable theatergoers for his next major film role. A Variety profile of Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins revealed that Mescal may have sewn up his starring role in the highly anticipated Gladiator sequel when he took his shirt off during a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, causing the audience to go wild.
Mescal won a Laurence Olivier Award for his turn as Stanley Kowalski—the macho protagonist of A Streetcar Named Desire, originated by Marlon Brando—in a recent production of Tennessee Williams’s classic play at the Phoenix theater on the West End. In the Variety profile, coheads of Paramount’s motion picture group, Michael Ireland and Daria Cercek, shared that they had attended a performance of Mescal’s production to see whether the Aftersun star might be the right actor to front Gladiator 2.
“There are several moments where he takes off his shirt and it was electric,” Cercek told Variety. “The ladies in the audience were very vocal, and we were like, ‘I think we’ve found our guy.’”
Thanks to those ladies (and Mescal’s acting talent), the Oscar nominee will star in Gladiator 2 as Lucius, the adult son of Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla. Nielsen starred in the original 2000 epic alongside Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix, and, as of now, is the only original Gladiator star reprising their role in Gladiator 2. The sequel will be directed by original Gladiator director Ridley Scott and, along with Mescal and Nielsen, will star Djimon Hounsou, Pedro Pascal, and Denzel Washington. At a recent press conference, Crowe seemed, perhaps, a little salty about not being involved in the sequel, saying, per Screen Daily, “they should be fucking paying me for the amount of questions I’ve had to answer about a fucking film that I’m not even in. It’s got nothing to do with me; in that world I’m dead, six feet under, and that’s that.”
Mescal is more than happy to pick up where Crowe left off. “Gladiator was one of my favorite films growing up. It’s beyond strange,” Mescal told Vanity Fair in February. “This all feels more dumbfounding than the Oscar nomination, to be honest.” A video of Mescal pumping iron at the gym, purportedly to prepare for the role, has been shared widely on social media, although it sounds like he was already in good enough shape to fill out those sandals.