Into Your Underwear Please - Paul Mescal's Trainer Before The "Gladiator II" Workouts Began

My first guest this evening is an Oscar-nominated actor you know from Normal People, After Sun, and All of Us Strangers. He now stars in Gladiator 2. What will you have us do? Well, you can return to your cells if you do not wish to fight this battle, or you can join me and fight for a freedom far beyond these walls. There once was a time when honor meant something in Rome. In this Rome, I no longer believe that exists. We must find it. And know this, where death is, we are not. Where we are, death is not. Bye-bye, Sean. Strike to mother! Please welcome back to The Late Show, Paul Meskel. I also got a movie star. It's so nice to have you here. We've spoken before. I've met you out from here, and I've interviewed you before, but it was during COVID. Welcome to The Unsolved for the first time. This is pretty cool, no? Yeah, it's lovely. Yeah, it feels great. A Broadway stage. Yeah, I know. Exactly, exactly. Well, I saw Gladiator 2 last night. The scale, so grand. It's like movies used to be made like this, and you've done a lot. Very successful. You've gotten a lot of great plaudits, but you've done independent films. Now you're in an honest-to-God Ridley Scott epic with one-to-one scale for the sets. You're in the Coliseum. He just built the Coliseum for you guys to be in. Built Rome, yeah. So what is that like for you, to go from wonderful, like an art house film, to these giant productions? I mean, sometimes I just feel like my brain is folding on itself. When I saw that for the first time, I was like, what is happening? If he was building a theater, he's building a theater. If he's building the Coliseum, he's building the Coliseum. I would say the Coliseum costs as much as every single film that I've ever done in its entirety. It feels, obviously, quite different, but I'm grateful that my job within those films, whether it's a Ridley Scott, or it's a Charlotte Wells, or it's on stage, thankfully, I think it feels somewhat the same. So no nerves going on? Oh, big time. Nerves. Nerves constantly. Did he help you with that? I feel like the nerves exist in that two or three months that lead up to filming, when you go into a hotel room, and you shut the door, and you're like, okay, here we go. And then you arrive to set, but he doesn't really have time for anything, including nerves. So he was very keen on the very first day of filming to, he was smoking a cigar and walked into the tent, and he's looking at me, and I'm probably somewhat ashen. He looks at me, and he goes, are you nervous? I don't know what the appropriate response to that question is, being like, I'm going to be leading your film, but I am also nervous. So I just made a noise. He proceeded to wallop me on the back and go, your nerves are no good to me. He goes, roll the cameras. Yeah. Wow. That was it. The movie, no spoilers here, but the movie Gladiator 2 has a lot of gladiatoring. It has lots of gladiatoring. Gladiatoring. Yeah. A lot of fighting. A lot of you, plenty sweaty. Real sweaty. I want to, just curious, is that, so, you know, here you are, not that you're not like a fit fella, but here you are all gladiator fit right there. And I'm just curious, how much training? How much training? The mighty have fallen. Exactly. So this isn't what it's like. This is not what it's like underneath here at the moment, unfortunately. All right. All right. So how long, how long, how much work is this? We did like two or three months leading up to it. I was on stage at the time, which is, it was really useful because you have your days to yourself. And then I had a trainer, a trainer called Tim Blakely, who's as big as that screen behind us. And he really looked after me. He was like, how do you take it through? Like, where did, like, do you take a baseline or anything like that? Okay. What are we working with here? So I was, it was like the week before the BAFTAs two years ago or whenever it was, he comes to the hotel and he was like, can we go up to your room? And I'm like, yeah, that sounds, sounds good. And he goes into your underwear, please. This is how this works. Okay. So I'm like stood there in my underwear and he's just kind of like circling me. I'm like doing his like mental, like his, his basically just doing like looking at my body scientifically. And he comes back and he's just like this intense silence. And he's just kind of looking at me with his head cocked and he goes, there's a canvas with which to work here. And then he proceeds, honestly proceeds to just like, like give me numbers in terms of how much kilos he wants me to put on in each body part. Wow. It was all like, just like lots of chicken, lots of like chicken breasts and stuff like that. All of the chicken imaginable. Oh wow. Yeah. Wow. Imagine it. We have to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Paul Meskel. Everybody stick around.