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?”
To film the sequence, Scott “cast 12 very small stuntmen. Some of them are not children, but tough teens, quite tiny.” He then dressed them all in black tights and, just for fun, put tiny whiskers on them as well. “And we went to war with stunt men,” he explained. “So it becomes a stunt men brawl of savagery. So then I had all the physicality recorded of the actors. I removed the guy in black tights, put in wire frames of baboons where it looks good… You then put on the flesh and the hair. That’s how you do it.” It’s too bad movies don’t automatically come with behind-the-scenes bonus features anymore because this writer would pay good money to watch those stuntmen fight with their little whiskers.
That’s a lot of baboon talk already, but Scott wasn’t done. Yet another idiot apparently said to the director, “I’ve never seen a baboon like that before” after he’d transformed the guys in tights into his savage, feral beasts. “I said, well, the baboon has alopecia, where you lose all your fucking hair,” Scott continued. “I copied that from the baboon I saw in the car park, which had alopecia.”
Even if he hadn’t modeled it directly, these things were never meant to be totally realistic in the first place. If they were, it wouldn’t be a Ridley Scott movie. For instance, what would the zoologists say when they heard about this particular conversion: “I said, Paul [Mescal], you know what would be cool? Turn the tables on the baboon. If you bite the baboon, the baboon will be psychologically in shock. Bite the baboon. When he snarls, you snarl back and the baboon goes, ‘holy shit.’ That’s meant to be funny.”
And what would the Ancient Roman historians say about this one? “They flooded the Colosseum for naval battles. I think what they did was put in big moray eels which can bite you hard,” the director said. “Whether they had a shark, I don’t know. But I thought, let’s go for the sharks.” Never change, Ridley.
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