Ridley Scott has been considering the Gladiator II baboons for years
A baboon interaction in a South African parking lot really lodged itself in the director's mind.
Image: Paramount Pictures/YouTube
Ridley Scott has had over two decades to consider what he wanted to add to his upcoming Gladiator sequel, and he spent at least four of those years thinking about baboons. Scott loves a lot of things—massive practical sets, Paul Mescal, extremely long epics, and more—but he really seems to love baboons. “A big baboon could be 40, 50 pounds; try wrestling a 20-pound Jack Russell Terrier and you’d lost [sic]. A baboon, you’ll lose your arm and your head. Can you hang from a beam by one arm for two hours? No, they can,” he said in a new interview with Deadline.
Of course, all that baboon talk didn’t come out of nowhere. In Gladiator II, Paul Mescal and his buddies take on a horde of very angry primates, which are somehow even more formidable than any of the other men in the ring. Did Ancient Rome actually have its sacrificial warriors fight baboons? Probably not, but who cares! They look great and they’re “meant to be funny” anyway.
Scott got the idea for this hilarious gag while watching an “idiot” tourist almost die in a parking lot in South Africa. He was there to film the pilot of 2020’s Raised By Wolves, he recalled, when “a little gamboling troop of baboons come across the wall and sits on the wall, staring at the tourists.” The idiot in question apparently went over to a big one and tried to pet it (like an idiot) when “this thing attacked him, and he’s a big man. The guy dropped his coffee, ran for the car, getting clawed as he struggled to get in the car. I thought that was funny, but I knew every actor had to do the physicality of the movement of defend, kill and or attack, right?”