The Gladiator II actor talks craft, collaboration and coming from a family of filmmakers.
For a moment, I don’t recognise Alexander Karim. Only a few nights before our interview I had seen the Swedish actor star in Ridley Scott’s enjoyably polarising sequel to 2000’s Gladiator, playing Ravi, doctor to the Gladiators and wise confidant to Paul Mescal’s prince-turned-slave Lucius. But the man now sitting in front of me looks a far cry from his screen alter-ego. The thick black beard that covers the bottom half of Ravi’s face has entirely disappeared, as has the long curly hair that once hung beside his ears. In place of a Roman-style tunic, the clean-shaven Karim is now sporting a simple crew-neck tee. What is unchanged, though, is the thoughtfulness with which both he and Ravi speak. “When I read the script for the first time I saw Ravi as this isle of clarity,” he tells me, calling me from his home in Sweden. “When Ravi echoes Maximus’ sentiments of ‘what we do in life echoes in eternity’, he’s not talking about statues or names engraved in the wall, he’s talking about the children we raise. That will echo in eternity. Love will echo. Once I realised that, I began to look at him not as a historical person, but as the friend that Lucius needed.”
Love will echo. It’s a sentiment Karim seems to carry on his own shoulders, especially through his relationship with his mother, brothers, wife, and children, all of whom he mentions during our conversation. He discusses his first brushes with the movies as a child—how his mother would transport him and his siblings to far-off cinematic worlds via VHS copies of ET, Blade Runner and Zoltan…Hound of Dracula—, collaborating with his filmmaker brother Baker on the award-winning The Dog, which Karim teases gleefully as Taxi Driver in the streets of Mombasa, and he and his wife writing children’s book The Bravest Girl in the World for his young daughter, as a way to teach her the value of one finding their inner courage.
Below, Karim talks relating to the original film’s Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe) as a young actor fresh out of drama school, collaborating with Ridley Scott on Gladiator II, and his experience coming from a family of filmmakers and cinephiles.
Luke Georgiades: Tell me about your experience with the original Gladiator.
Alexander Karim: I remember it vividly. I was just out of drama school and I was living in LA. I had all my hopes and dreams, going from Sweden to LA, going to drama school there, getting to play all these big parts, the Hamlets, the Othellos, the Richard the Thirds, and then you make it out of drama school, and that’s the time when Gladiator came out. It’s a film about a man who has the whole Roman Empire against him, with this whole world to conquer, and that’s pretty much the feeling you have your first couple of years out of drama school. You’re hitting the pavement trying to get any kind of work that you can. So I related to Maximus back then. To me, we were the same.
LG: How do you think the industry’s changed for young actors since then?
AK: I can only imagine what it’s like for young actors now, because you have so many other outlets. When I was young, it was film, TV and theatre. Those were our choices. For young actors coming up now, there’s things like YouTube tugging at you. There’s TikTok. And it’s alluring: if somebody comes to you with a bag of cash to start a YouTube channel, of course you take it, not thinking about whether it might affect my acting career. You don’t think at the time “If I’m hawking merchandise online maybe someone’s not going to want me for Hamlet after that.” And obviously you can do a commercial and obviously you can use your social media platform, but it’s important to keep people around you who’ll steer you the right way.
LG: Were you nervous about meeting Ridley for the first time?
AK: I come from a family of filmmakers, my two brothers are directors, and the making of Alien was the first behind the scenes movie that we watched growing up. Ridley’s been a part of our household for as long as I can remember. So meeting him for the first time, being “summoned” to his trailer…I’m not one to get nervous, but I was a little starstruck. But he has a way of putting people at ease and just chatting. He’s a normal guy. Just your everyday genius.
LG: Was there anything that surprised you about the way he directs?
AK: I think many people have an image of these huge directors who have decided beforehand what they want and you’re just a puppet for them. That’s not what it’s like. Most super successful directors that I’ve been able to work with are the opposite. They cast who they want to cast and then they want to stand back and see what you want to bring to the part. Working with Ridley is like a game of poker: “I see your choice, and I will raise you this…” and we keep raising the stakes together. He would ask me to find something in my character, and sometimes I would tell him about it and other times I’d wait until the camera was rolling and just do it—and he’d say “that was fuckin’ great! Keep it! Keep it!” [laughs].
LG: How is the creative process different when you’re working with your brothers, who you mentioned are also filmmakers?
AK: We just finished a movie together called The Dog, and, working on a project like that, everybody on set knows that we’re brothers, so we have to be even more professional. Otherwise it crumbles. We need to show that we’re not messing around. But there is this shorthand that we have with each other where he doesn’t need to direct me with words, he can just go “mmm”, and I’ll go “ah. Got you.” I always know what he’s after. He can say “why don’t you add a touch of uncle so-and-so to this moment” and I will know exactly what he means by that. But even with non familial directors, truly great filmmakers know what you can bring and they know how to pull it out of you. You’re never scared of leaping because you know the net will appear.
LG: Tell me more about The Dog.
AK: We shot it in Kenya. It’s like Taxi Driver in the streets of Mombasa.
LG: That’s a great one-line elevator pitch.
AK: Yeah, one of the reviews coined that! It’s won a bunch of awards already. It’s off to be distributed now.
LG: Does that creative urge you and your brothers have to make and invest yourselves in cinema come from your parents?
AK: We had an 8mm projector, and we used to watch a synopsis version of the first Star Wars. It was the whole film cut down to 12 minutes on a reel, and we used to project that onto the wall. That was the first film we ever owned, and we’d watch it, rewind it manually, watch it again, rewind it, twelve times a day. Then the VHS came and we’d watch everything we could get our hands on.
Our mom was a single mom from Uganda with four kids, and we were living in a rough neighbourhood up North in Sweden. She had an idea that her kids needed to go to the best schools, so she travelled down South and found a nice town, went to the most expensive neighbourhood, and said “this is where we’re going to live.” Back in the 80s, if you wanted to live somewhere and you wanted a loan, the bank would give it to you and it was up to you to pay them back. They wouldn’t check your income. It was just, take the money, and if you can’t pay, we’ll take it. So we moved to a posh area and our mom used to work like a madwoman to make ends meet. All our rich school friends would go to Switzerland or Italy or LA for the holidays. We couldn’t afford that, but what we did have was a VHS and a TV, so my family’s vacations were to space, to the moon, to ET-land, to Blade Runner. Those were our vacations: a pile of VHS’s. Transportation. Escape. And our mom has always loved all kinds of films, so she had shown us Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments and Citizen Kane by the time I was seven. Then we’d watch the D-classics like Zoltan…Hound of Dracula [laughs]. We saw everything. My layman analysis of the situation is that when my mom came home all eyes were glued to the TV. All kids want to be seen by their parents, and back then my subconscious thinking was “if your parents are always staring at the TV then maybe you should be on the TV.”
LG: How did you go about reaching into the heart of your character Ravi in Gladiator II?
AK: When I read it for the first time I saw Ravi as the isle of clarity. There’s all thai madness going on around Lucius—everyone’s power-hungry, or fame-hungry, or simply hungry for blood—but when he meets Ravi I wanted it to be like two friends hanging out and having a beer. Lucius is an orphan, so he needs that friendship. He’s looking for context in which to live his life. Ravi offers him that context. He teaches him the value of family. When Ravi echoes Maximus’ sentiments of “what we do in life echoes in eternity”, he’s not talking about statues or names engraved in the wall, he’s talking about the children we raise: that will echo in eternity. Love will echo. Once I realised that, I began to look at him not as a historical person, but as the friend that Lucius needed.
LG: Was there a part of you that was disappointed that you wouldn’t be fighting a rhinoceros in the coliseum?
AK: Of course. Look, man [laughs] the movie was called Gladiator—I worked out like a crazy person, two or three times a day, prepping for the film, and then when I got to set and was sitting in Ridley’s trailer, he said “I have some thoughts on costumes…” and i thought “okay, this is going to be cool…” and he said, “I see Ravi in layers, layers upon layers upon layers” [laughs]. Then I saw the costume and I knew it made more sense than a breastplate. And I saw the guys who were in breastplates, and, man, I got in shape but you can’t compete against 25 year olds oiled-up, muscle-packed, living in a gym for the past seven years.
LG: You’re also a writer, you’ve written a few books, including a children’s book. What kind of nourishment does writing give you that maybe the screen and the stage can’t?
AK: I started writing because when I moved back to Sweden from the States there weren’t any good parts, and the parts that were available to people of colour were just garbage. So I started writing scripts, and got short films and features produced, in the hope of changing the perception of people of colour. Scripts are hard to get produced so at one point I decided to adapt one of them into a novel [The Extraordinary Tale of Jonas Paulssons’ All Too Sudden Death], which got published by Sweden’s biggest publishing house and got great reviews and is now being turned into a TV show.
The children’s books I write with my wife, and they’re a love letter to my daughter, who was eight at the time and afraid of everything, so we wrote a book called The Bravest Girl in the World, about a girl who is scared of everything but finds her courage.
I love acting and I love being on set, but it’s an extremely social job, you meet a hundred new people a day. I love that, but having this other job, where it’s waking up and sitting on one side of the bed typing away while my wife, who is also a writer, types away on her side, and the only talking that happens is “do you want to read my chapter and I’ll read yours?” I’m still creating and working with character and dialogue, but it allows me to rest that actor part of the brain and access a different kind of creativity.
