May Calamawy, the breakout star of Marvel’s Moon Knight series on Disney Plus, is joining the ever-expanding cast of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator sequel.
Calamawy is an Egyptian actress who turned heads in Moon Knight playing Layla El-Faouly, the on-again-off-again love interest of Oscar Isaac’s Marc Spector. (On again when he’s Marc Spactor; off again when he’s one of several other personalities.)
Per Deadline, Scott did a thorough search for the role that Calamawy landed, having many different actors read for the part and putting Calamawy herself through several auditions.
Also joining the cast are Lior Raz (Operation Finale), Derek Jacobi (Good Omens), Peter Mensah (Avatar), and Matt Lucas (Bridesmaids). Jacobi is the only one of the new hires who’s reprising a role from the original Gladiator.
The host of new players adds to an already stacked cast that includes Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, and Connie Nielsen — who, like Jacobi, is reprising her role from the original Gladiator.
According to Deadline, another actor is currently in negotiations to join the cast: Fred Hechinger from season 1 of The White Lotus, who is in talks to play Emperor Geta. Hechinger can next be seen in Sony’s Kraven the Hunter this coming October.
That’s a lot of casting news, but fans of the original will remember the legions of actors who filled pretty much every frame of the movie besides the Colosseum floor and Maximus’ prison cell. The phrase “Rome wasn’t built in a day” suggests the amount of sheer manpower necessary to help create such a spectacle. Ridley Scott is basically doing the same thing here, despite that Maximus is dead and no one has any clue why the story is continuing.