UrbanUpdate

This story is from Gladiator Week, GQ’s dive into all things Gladiator in pop culture to celebrate the release of Gladiator II. Read the rest of the stories here.

Paul Mescal knows that in life, as in battle, there’s no such thing as perfect timing. The Irish actor was knee-deep in a London production of A Streetcar Named Desire when he got the call from Sir Ridley Scott to ask him to don the sandals for Gladiator II.

Realizing he had just 12 weeks until filming was due to start, Mescal reached out to Tim Blakely, a Navy man-turned-bodybuilder and PT to the stars. Not only does Blakely have prior experience getting the likes of John Boyega and Gerard Butler in shape, his Media Physiques gym was a convenient walk from where Mescal was on stage six nights a week.

“We met in a hotel and hit it off,” Blakely says. “The brief was [for Mescal] to put on size and get stronger. He didn’t want to go down the Marvel route of looking cartoony—we were thinking back-row rugby player type; strong, fit, fast, and agile like a decathlete.”

“Paul is an athlete,” says Blakely. “He played Gaelic football at quite a high level. I’d played rugby at a high level and the strength and conditioning wasn’t as regimented as Paul had done, so he was really body-aware coming into it.”

Paul Mescal's 12-week Gladiator routine

Setting out to make a Gladiator sequel comes with a lot of pressure. Director Ridley Scott had toyed with the idea on and off ever since the 2000 original. For Mescal, the film has the potential to take his career to the next level—just as it did for Russell Crowe, who won an Oscar for his performance.

Looking back, by the standards of today's blockbusters, Crowe’s physique was much more attainable for the average guy. Mescal’s approach to getting ripped went the same way—partly by design, and partly because there’s only so big you can get in 12 weeks.

He and Blakely hit the ground running, working out five or six days a week, with Mescal going to his evening theatre performances straight afterwards. They started out doing a standard push, pull, legs split, focusing on short, intense reps while Mescal was still working on the West End. Then, when his attention turned to being a gladiator full time, Blakely up the intensity to one body part per session, five days a week.

“Obviously there's a lot of crossover in that,” explains Blakely. “Shoulders are working on chest days, triceps are working on shoulder and chest days, and biceps are working on back days.”

After a warm-up “feeder set” with an intermediate weight, they’d go into two rounds of hard, heavy lifts per exercise—a luxury allowed them by Mescal’s already solid basis in fitness. “We might add in drop sets every now and again,” says Blakely—a technique that involves performing a set of exercises until you reach muscular failure, then immediately reducing the weight and repeating the exercise. “So we do a triple drop set, maybe on chest press, for example.”

Leg day wasn't skipped

Given that he was running around on stage every night—and later filming in 100-degree heat on location in North Africa—Mescal was already really fit, so they ditched the cardio. Which isn’t to say his legs got a rest.

“A lot of actors miss leg day, but it was really important to us,” Blakely says. “If you’re running around an arena, you need big powerful legs. It also helps your gait. We wanted him to walk into that arena with a powerful walk, and he did.”

The legs are also where a lot of hitting power comes from—for sword swinging and things like that. Apparently he nailed it, with co-star Pedro Pascal calling Mescal’s performance “brutal," reportedly begging him to go easy on him during their fight scenes, saying he’d “rather be thrown from a building” than fight Mescal again.

As for stunt work, Blakely left all of that to stunt coordinator Nikki Berwick, trusting in her experience and Mescal’s athleticism to ensure he had the mobility needed to outmaneuver an enemy (or a charging rhino).

“Swinging a sword was never an issue for me or for him,” says Blakely. “We didn’t need to worry about it because we knew Nikki would take care of it. She and I had a combined game plan.”

Mescal's Gladiator diet

Nutrition-wise, Mescal stuck to all the usual good stuff: eggs, chicken, beef, rice, fish and so on.

Except, there was one caveat: “There were some negotiations with Paul,” says Blakely. “At the start he said ‘I warn you, I do drink and I do smoke. He realized he would have to curtail that, but he wanted to work in times he could have a few drinks here and there.”

Blakely didn’t see it as a problem, equating a few pints to calories in/calories out. “If you're prepared to sacrifice on the other end, that's something that we can do,” was his response.

It got to the point where not only would Mescal tell Blakely how many drinks he’d had since their last session, but he’d also ask how many drinks his current session allowed him that night—a level of honesty refreshing in Blakely’s celebrity clients.

“His body just soaked up [the food],” says Blakely. “He was putting on lean tissue while losing weight.”

Despite the odd pint and cig, Blakely calls Mescal a “dream client” enthusing that he was never late, was always committed, and always left his phone in the locker room. In fact, he became such an exercise aficionado that Blakely remembers Mescal correcting his brother’s form when the three would train together.

One quirk was that Mescal needed to know how torturous the workouts would be in advance. “Paul’s brain needs to know what he's got to do before he starts,” laughs Blakely. “There'd be a five minute negotiation of what we're going to do and how much we're going to do each session, and once he's got that in his head it's literally head down and get it done.”

Filming in Morocco they did finally include some sprint work. Blakely says that Mescal, in typical fashion, went all out. “If anything, I had to hold him back,” he says. “When he does something, he does it at 110%, and I didn't want him doing that, I wanted him doing 80% so he didn’t hurt himself.”

Blakely's training tips

Blakely is quick to point out that everyone is different, and it’s unlikely you’ll be A) as pushed for time as Mescal or B) training to fight sharks in a flooded arena. With that in mind, he suggests you stick to the usual four to five-set, ten-rep range in performing the below routine, which is based on Mescal’s chest day workout.

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“I always start with upper chest, because I feel that upper chest is harder to get and most guys need more upper chest development than lower chest,” he says.

Incline chest pressSet a bench to a 45 degree angle and grab either a barbell or dumbbell. Push the weight up, keeping it slow and steady with the movement north of your nipples to hit those upper pecs. Now we’re warmed up, it’s on to:

Chest pressLower the bench to flat, and repeat, this time keeping the weight in line with your nips to hit the front of the chest. Again, slow and steady is best, especially if you’re going heavy.

DipsPerform dips as usual, but instead of keeping yourself upright like a pencil, this time you’re going to lean forward so that your downward movement really opens up the chest, forcing it to work just as hard as your triceps.

Incline cable flyDrag the bench across to the cable machine and set it up as before. With slightly lowered handles, you’re going to draw the cables across your body in front of your chest. Using cables instead of standard dumbbell flys increases tension as you’re fighting against the tension in the cable, forcing you to work even harder to stabilize the movement.

Cable flyThe next move is pretty much the same, but changes the plane of the arms to come lower than in an incline set. To do this, move the cables higher, so that you’re pulling them down and across your chest towards your waist, as opposed to towards each other to meet in the middle, as per the previous set.

This story originally appeared on British GQ.

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Tom Ward is a UK-based journalist and author. He has reported on spelunking microbiologists, the quest to dive to the bottom of the Arctic ocean, torturous ultramarathons in the Mojave desert and Tennessee backwoods, Brexit preppers, Edmund Hillary’s search for the Yeti, and one company’s international quest for quiet. ‘The... Read moreXRelated Stories for GQPaul MescalGladiator WeekMoviesWorking Out