Gladiator II serves as a sequel to the 2000 Oscar-winning feature Gladiator. The plot takes 16 years after the first movie and follows a man initially known as Hanno (Paul Mescal), a Roman refugee living in Numidia. When Rome attacks his new home, Hanno is enslaved and forced to become a gladiator. In the course of the movie, the real identities of Hanno and that of his biological father are revealed.
Is Lucius Maximus’ son in Gladiator 2?
Hanno is revealed to be Lucius Verus, the young son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) from the first movie. Gladiator 2 also discloses that his biological father is Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe).
Lucius was introduced in the first movie as the son of a man whose name he shares. However, there were implications that things might be a bit more complicated than that. Gladiator hints at a past romance between Lucilla and Maximus but doesn’t establish it as a fact. In contrast, the sequel embraces the idea, revealing that Lucius is the product of that relationship.
The movie also implies through its characters that Lucilla’s husband wasn’t interested in women and that she took lovers. After the deaths of Maximus and Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), Lucilla realized that Rome was no longer safe for her son, the sole male heir to Marcus Aurelius.
In the following years, her son came to resent her and Rome for this apparent abandonment. After his wife died in the war with Rome, that resentment transformed into downright hatred. When Lucilla sees her son for the first time in the Colosseum, she recognizes who he is because he has similar mannerisms as Maximus.
She later goes to speak to him and try to discern whether he is indeed her son. Lucius initially rebuffs her efforts and tells her to leave after she tells him about his true parentage. While the love for Rome he inherited from both sides of his family might have become dormant, it never went away. In the climactic sequences, he puts on his father’s armor and uses his father’s sword to become the hero Rome needs.