It’s often said never to work with children or animals if you want everything to be smooth-sailing.
Well, whoever parrots this line has clearly not met Ridley Scott.
“[Scott] is pretty fantastic because I think he laughs in the face of every rule imaginable,” Gladiator II star Fred Hechinger tells 9honey Celebrity in Sydney.
Watch the video above.
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“If you say don’t work with, you know, kids, animals, he’s like, ‘I want 100 animals to fill the Colosseum with them,'” he continues.
Hechinger, perhaps more than anyone else in the Gladiator II cast, knows this fact about Scott first-hand.
The 24-year-old actor’s main co-star, aside from his character Emperor Caracalla’s on-screen brother Emperor Geta (Joseph Quinn), is a “beautiful monkey” named Dundus.
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“I think of him as this leader of controlled chaos,” Hechinger continues.
“I think animals are perfectly chaotic, they represent all these impulses, and the way that [Scott’s] built what the Colosseum is also so much about our animalistic impulses.
“So I think when you have a monkey screaming on a guy’s shoulder, it it makes you very quickly consider who that person is and his lack of humanity or insight.”
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Hechinger’s Caracalla is one half of what Scott calls “the real loonies”.
Loosely based on the Roman emperor of the same name, Caracalla – even more so than his twin brother, Geta (Quinn) – is a character whose next move you can never predict, and that makes for a pretty compelling epic with high stakes.
It was also a performance helped by that of Dundus, of who Hechinger previously told Entertainment Weekly: ”You know, you can really count on a monkey to surprise you as well.”
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“We became friends,” Hechinger continued.
“We spent time together. Yeah, I rehearsed a lot with Dundus and I rehearsed a lot with Joe. These are two great collaborators in very different ways.
“Joe and I, I would say, had deeper conversations, but Dundus and I definitely spent quality time as well.”
Gladiator II hits Australian cinemas on November 14.
