Russell Crowe had a blunt response to Nick Cave’s ambitious Gladiator sequel script: “Don’t like it, mate.”
The screenplay, which Cave described as “a stone cold masterpiece,” imagined Maximus resurrected by Roman gods, tasked with assassinating Jesus Christ, and battling across historical eras—a far cry from the grounded drama of the original film.
In a recent interview with PEOPLE, film director Ridley Scott, who had spoken on the topic previously, finally revealed exactly what Crowe thought of the revered Aussie musician’s screenplay for the Gladiator sequel.
Scott recalled: “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.’”
“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.”
Cave’s concept — his first screenplay since John Hillcoat’s The Proposition in 2005 — was undeniably bold. In the script, Maximus descended to purgatory, where gods sent him back to kill Christ, whose growing influence was threatening their power. The story spanned centuries, culminating in a climactic 20-minute war sequence featuring battles from ancient Rome to Vietnam.
Even alternative ideas to bring Maximus back—such as having his soul inhabit the body of a dying soldier—failed to convince Crowe. As Scott recalled, Crowe bluntly pointed out, “That’s no fucking good, is it?”
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Cave’s version would also have seen it turn into a musical of sorts, with Ridley adding in another interview, “Nick Cave did a great job of invention and Russell was fully engaged. We all were, but I was the one dragging my feet. I was like, ‘I dunno about this.’ I thought we were getting too far off the mark, and if you do that, that’s where you can lose it.”
Crowe, was (again) more straightforward with his thoughts. “I was confident about my abilities as a leading man,” he said about the film in 2023. “What I wasn’t confident about with ‘Gladiator’ was the world that was surrounding me. At the core of what we were doing was a great concept but the script, it was rubbish, absolute rubbish. And it had all these sorts of strange sequences.”
The singer detailed his version of events on writing te script, titled “Christ Killer,” on a recent WTF podcast episode: ” (Crowe) rang me up and asked if I wanted to write ‘Gladiator 2,” he said. “For someone who had only written one film script, it was quite an ask. ‘Hey Russell, didn’t you die in ‘Gladiator 1′?’ ‘Yeah, you sort that out.’”
Cave later reflected on the experience with humour. “I enjoyed writing it very much because I knew on every level that it was never going to get made,” he mused.
Now, Ridley Scott has returned to familiar ground with Gladiator 2, starring Paul Mescal as Lucius, the nephew of Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus. While Nick Cave’s version remains a wild Hollywood “what if,”
Meanwhile, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds released their latest album, Wild God last month — the rock band’s first album since 2019’s Ghosteen, a critically acclaimed double album that was shortlisted for the Australian Music Prize, and their 18th album overall.
“I hope the album has the effect on listeners that it’s had on me,” Cave previously said about Wild God. “It bursts out of the speaker, and I get swept up with it. It’s a complicated record, but it’s also deeply and joyously infectious. There is never a masterplan when we make a record. The records rather reflect back the emotional state of the writers and musicians who played them. Listening to this, I don’t know, it seems we’re happy.”
Wild God was co-produced by Cave and Warren Ellis, mixed by David Fridmann (Mogwai, Low), and Cave started writing the record on New Year’s Day 2023. “Wild God…there’s no fucking around with this record,” Cave adds. “When it hits, it hits. It lifts you. It moves you. I love that about it.”
