There is something profoundly affecting about an encounter with Connie Nielsen. On screen, she tends to play tall, powerful women; in the Wonder Woman films, the savage and noble Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta. And in director Ridley Scott’s iconic Gladiator, the emperor’s daughter Lucilla, a role she has reprised for the film’s highly anticipated sequel, Gladiator II.

In conversation, however, Nielsen, 59, is something else. She is deeply authentic. Her answers to questions are long, articulate and thoughtful. And her perspective of the world is an unexpected and compelling fusion of sensuality and academia.

It comes as no surprise then, that when Scott offered her the role of Lucilla in the original Gladiator, her first thought was to visit the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, a museum in Copenhagen, in her native Denmark, where a bust of the real Annia Aurelia Galeria Lucilla was on display. Her purpose? To meet the woman, face to face, before she took on the task of playing her. “I had to build an image of her and the first thing I noticed was the clear misogyny of Roman historians,” Nielsen says. “Their view of women was so apparent in the way she was described that I knew it had to be different.”

Nielsen also visited New York’s Metropolitan Museum and the British Museum in London to look at Lucilla’s male contemporaries, in particular the bust of Marcus Aurelius – her character’s father, played by Richard Harris in the original Gladiator – which is on display in London.

“I looked at the men and I got this subliminal experience of what it must have been like to have that guy as your father, [a man] who was leading an empire while writing books on philosophy,” Nielsen says. “I felt she had received a lot of love and had not received a lot of respect. This was a woman who’d had to learn to survive; she’d had to learn to understand the corridors of power. And I felt that if her father was writing so much about moral values and the perception of ethics, then she had to have, somewhere, adopted some of these.”

‘I didn’t see that with my 178 centimetres of tall, blonde woman, that I wasn’t necessarily going to be considered for those films at the time.’

CONNIE NIELSEN

Nielsen was raised in a very traditional environment – in a Mormon family in Elling, a small village on the northern coast of Denmark – and rebelled at an early age. The library gave her an escape into intellectual universes that challenged and excited her, and later she rejected her religious upbringing more comprehensively, leaving Denmark for France, and then Italy.

“I came out of Denmark at the age of 18 with, I’m just going to say it straight up, a really traumatic past,” Nielsen says. “I think I had so much growing to do. I left with the intention of doing real movies ... because the films that mattered were being made in Paris. There was America, but I was a little bit of a snob at the time. I was very into this idea of arthouse movies and I wasn’t being very realistic. I didn’t see that with my 178 centimetres of tall, blonde woman, that I wasn’t necessarily going to be considered for those films at the time.

“I never saw myself as a pretty woman or anything like that. So, I was confused a lot in my first five years as an actor. Why do people think this about me? I was at a loss.”

In 1994, Nielsen auditioned for the romantic comedy French Kiss. She didn’t get the role but it was that film’s director, Lawrence Kasdan, who suggested she try her luck in America. “He was a director who I admired so I took his advice,” Nielsen says. “I had to learn to find a way to be who I was first. I’m this odd bookworm nerd who happens to be seen as if I’m some pretty woman, and it’s still odd to me.”

Kasdan’s advice would prove providential. Just four years later, in 1999, Nielsen would find herself in Malta, Morocco and the slightly less-exotic Surrey in the UK, making the first Gladiator film.

“You could feel this creative tension on the set from the start,” Nielsen says. At the first table read of the script, Oliver Reed was reading his lines in “bombastic style” and Russell Crowe – who played slave-turned-general Maximus Decimus Meridius – was reading each line in a different accent.

“He was poking a lot of fun at that because I think there was a disagreement about which accent he should be using,” Nielsen says. “And Joaquin Phoenix [who played Lucilla’s brother, Commodus] was sitting almost invisible and speaking the lines as if he was reading them word by word, putting absolutely no acting into it.”

For a 33-year-old Danish actor, it was a wild introduction to Hollywood. “I remember Ridley telling me that he was excited,” Nielsen says. “There were all these grand, iconic actors from another era, and I was wondering how Ridley was going to deal with an entire cast of crazy people? What I realised was that he feeds off that extraordinary amount of passion and ego and interpretation and love of acting that all of them had in common. For them, acting was something religious, sacred, and to which they brought their experience and characters to such a degree, it was magic to walk on set.”

The success of Gladiator was extraordinary. It made almost $US500 million at the box office. Nielsen’s career flourished. She went on to star in Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars, One Hour Photo with Robin Williams, and John McTiernan’s Basic, with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson.

In 2004 – at 38 – she finally made her debut in a film in her homeland with Brødre (Brothers), directed by Susanne Bier, who has become one of Hollywood’s most revered directors of high-end television with The Undoing and The Perfect Couple, to her name.

Since 2017, Nielsen has also played another icon of historical female power, Queen Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons and mother of Wonder Woman, in the films Wonder Woman, Justice League (and its director’s recut Zack Snyder’s Justice League) and Wonder Woman 1984.

And now, Nielsen returns to the role of Lucilla in Gladiator II, which picks up the story two decades later, with Lucilla connected romantically to the popular Roman general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), who is struggling to deal with the unstable twin emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger).

In this chaos, Lucilla’s son Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal) – sent away as a child for his safety, but later captured and enslaved – returns to Rome as a gladiator-in-the-making, ostensibly to fight his way to freedom, but in truth intent on destroying everything, including the empire, and his estranged mother.

First, an important question on behalf of the straight women and gay men of the world: is Pedro Pascal as handsome in person as he is on the screen? Nielsen laughs, then becomes serious: “He is beyond that,” she says. “I cannot tell you the natural energy emanating from this beautiful soul. Pedro is so wonderful – wonderful as a human and as an actor. We had such a great time doing our scenes together.

“Pedro is also such a smart actor, and I don’t think he gets enough credit for that because he’s so charming and gorgeous and witty,” she adds. “That guy is the whole package.”

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And of course, then there is the transformation of Lucilla, not just in the context of her place in Roman history, but in the telling of a story of political decay and the complex power wielded by women in politics, landing in an American election year.

Nielsen credits Scott and Gladiator II screenwriter David Scarpa with giving Lucilla the space to flourish in three dimensions. “I am interested as an actor ... in seeing the difference between who women really are and the way they are extraordinarily different to the way they’re often portrayed in film. I find it, at times, offensive, at times aggravating, at times sad.

“I spoke at a women’s leadership conference and the moment I talked about being underestimated and undervalued, you [could just] feel the whole room exhale,” she adds. “Yes, it speaks to the wound of being consistently aggressed against a less powerful subgroup, and that is an important part of the story, and it needs to be valued and seen. But when it becomes our only mirror to the world, then our future will continue to feature those aggressions.”

Gladiator II opens in cinemas November 14.

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