Paul Mescal is maybe a little too good at his job.
The 28-year-old actor honed his body for “Gladiator II” so exquisitely that the filmmakers made him go shirtless for as many scenes as possible, according to his personal trainer Tim Blakeley.
In an interview with The Post, Blakeley also revealed the secret weapon he deployed to help the Irish star get a quick pump on set: Coca-cola.
Mescal’s show-stopping figure was hard won. The actor had only 12 weeks to get in fighting shape after director Ridley Scott gave him the good news that he would be playing the film’s hero, Lucius. With an already full schedule performing in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” on London’s West End, time was tight.
A blockbuster on the line, Mescal needed the perfect personal trainer to prepare him to withstand the slings and arrows of the Roman colosseum.
Enter Blakeley, Royal Navy veteran, seasoned bodybuilder, personal trainer and owner of Media Physiques, a company that specializes in helping actors get their bodies camera ready.
The fitness pro has worked with — and worked out — a bevy of Hollywood bodies, including John Boyega, Luke Evans, Thandiwe Newton and Taron Egerton, to name a few.
From the beginning, Mescal’s training was focused on adding “size and strength.”
“We had to get some muscle tissue on him pretty quick,” Blakeley told The Post.
The actor worked out five to six days a week, focusing on a different body part each session. But Mescal didn’t have to spend hours upon hours pumping iron each day. In fact, he only needed about 45 minutes to an hour in any given session. As Blakeley explained, any more than that amount of time was a waste.
“Once you once you put the body under stress and under load, and you’ve elicited the training response, then any sets or reps after that, you’re just burning calories,” he explained. “You can get body parts done in under an hour.”
He continued, “Everything we did in the gym really had to be effective and efficient. You know, we didn’t have time to be doing fluffy stuff.”
Mescal went into the training process with experience as an athlete, having played Gaelic football at quite a high level, and crucially had the necessary mindset to get results.
“With Paul, there’s no wasted sets. With Paul we’d literally do a couple of warm-up sets, then we do a feeder set just to check his form, two working sets to failure or near failure and then we move on, next exercise,” Blakeley said.
“Paul is one of the hardest-working actors in the business,” the fitness pro added, describing Mescal’s attitude as “head down and get it done.”
“He never complained. He was just a complete workhorse. He never missed a single session and every time he was in the gym, it was no phones out or anything like that. The phone was in the locker,” the trainer recalled.
Mescal did push back at times on what his training would consist of — though not with much success. “He wanted to know what we were doing, I’d tell him what we were doing, and we might have a slight conversation about that, but in the end, I always won,” Blakeley said.
After three months of intense training, consuming 300 grams of protein a day (along with the occasional gin and tonic), Mescal was ready to enter the arena.
But when the star showed up on set, there was just one problem. He looked too good.
“Because he turned up looking so good, a lot of his scenes, they were like, ‘Right, shirt off,’” Blakeley recalled.
That presented a challenge, because while most actors only have to prepare to appear simultaneously shredded and jacked in maybe one or two shirtless scenes, Mescal’s body had to look picture-perfect every day.
“Quite a lot of actors get reveals in films, like they might have a shower scene where you could go, ‘Right. That’s the day we work backward from.’ Because we know it’s coming,” Blakeley explained.
“And you know, we might sort of water-cut a little bit; we might carb load the day before the scene,” he continued, citing a few tactics trainers favor to get their clients photo-ready.
“But because he had his shirt off so much, you just have to keep your physique looking as tight as possible the whole time,” Blakeley said.
The physicality of Mescal’s role — there are, in fact, a few fight scenes in this movie — combined with the scorching heat the actors faced filming in Malta and Morocco meant that hacks like water-cutting were out of the question.
“He couldn’t do sort of traditional planning because it was pretty much most days [that he was shirtless].”
But Blakeley did have one sweet trick up his sleeve to help Paul pump up before a take.
“Because he likes Coke, if we had a scene that was controllable, I’d just let him have some Coke before just to get some glycogen in the muscles so you can get a bit of a pump on,” the strength coach explained.
Though Blakeley was responsible for helping Mescal chisel his body, Mescal created the vision of what that body should look like.
The actor decided to forgo “the Marvel route,” according to Blakeley, and prioritize athleticism and authenticity instead of what Mescal has called the “underwear model body.”
“He wanted to feel capable, that’s the word he used,” the trainer recalled.
And Mescal didn’t receive any pushback from the production. Ridley Scott trusted Mescal’s vision for his character’s physique.
“Once I met Paul, he has such a good relationship with Ridley — he really trusted him,” Blakeley shared. “I think [Ridley] really was quite happy for Paul to sort of lead the way in the way that his character should look.”
“And obviously, Russell Crowe didn’t have a Marvel-type physique,” the fitness pro added, referring to the first “Gladiator” film.
“I felt that there wasn’t really any pressure on him in terms of production,” he continued.
The one note the filmmakers did have was one Blakeley, Mescal and everyone else agreed with: he had to get bigger and stronger.
“Paul had the main say but he was on board, he wanted to bigger and stronger,” Blakeley said.
“His character is a very skilled and competent fighter. So with that you needed strength, agility and speed. And he had the agility and the speed. He just needed the size and the strength.”
“Gladiator II” hits theaters Friday, Nov. 22.
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