Hercules.
An honor
to host such a legend.
Lord Cotys.
But in legend, you fight alone.
In our version of Hercules, in the mythology,
Hercules has his group of mercenaries, who he's very close with.
-Yeah. -Be in line, can you? Fall back.
It's a group of, I feel, lonely people.
And they've met each other and they found each other because of war.
This is a time in their lives when they've all been doing it for so long,
they're a little battle-weary.
I fear that the task ahead might not be suitable for a woman.
She's the only woman in this very, very masculine world.
I love these guys. It's such a varied group of people.
And we've just really got along really well.
Brett Ratner, he has cast this in a way that's not obviously Hollywoody.
There are lots of really established
and interesting, eclectic European actors, obviously I'm pleased about
because it meant there's more of a chance of me being in it.
-You set? -Okay, let's slowly dolly in, guys.
Settle please.
Slowly, keep going.
We never really saw them all together
till we saw them all together on the first test.
When you see them, you're, like, "Oh, my God."
And that's when we got so excited about it.
'Cause we saw them all together in full costume, hair and make-up.
Great.
Look towards the camera, DJ. Yeah.
Their names were pretty complicated, so they were asking me,
"What's my name again? How do you say it?"
So we had to do phonetic versions of all the names for everybody.
Autolycus of Sparta. Tydeus of Thebes.
Atalanta of Scythia. Iolaus of Athens.
And Amphiaraus of Argos.
Amphiaraus?
We wanted to create a look for Hercules that an audience has never seen before.
And we have esteemed, award-winning, Oscar winning Hair, Make-up,
who helped the transformation process every morning, three-and-a-half hours.
Aged up a little bit, longer hair, matted beard, unkempt.
Still handsome though. Scars everywhere.
It was a tremendous transformational process
to sit there for three-and-a-half hours, four hours sometimes,
every single day for 95 days, we did that.
Worth every second.
We need something to mirror the idea of a god.
And Dwayne does that pretty good.
Move your hair a little bit to the side
so we can see a little bit of that scar. Yeah.
The first time I met him, that was the camera test.
And they told me to stand next to him.
And then Brett said, "Okay, everyone, turn towards each other."
And I was thinking,
"Holy Maloney, now I will have a moment with Dwayne Johnson."
And I looked up to him, I was thinking, "Say something smart."
And I said...
"You are very tall and big."
Very smart. I felt so intelligent.
Autolycus, who is played by Rufus Sewell, is a tremendous actor
who has great weight to him and he's got a great look.
He's got eyes that I got lost in.
I got lost in Rufus' eyes.
That's a pretty sight.
I loved Autolycus 'cause he was sarcastic.
Or if you're lucky, you'll go to Hades, where all the fun people are.
He had a great, slightly dark sense of humor.
And he got some throwing knives.
I always loved James Coburn in The Magnificent Seven,
that to have throwing knives was pretty cool.
It brings out the kid in me.
I play Amphiaraus.
There was a lot of talk about how to pronounce his name.
It was Amphia-raus, Amphiariari...
Everybody had problems with Greek names.
We eventually settled on Amphiaraus.
He was not too savory a character in his early life,
but got the calling from Zeus, became a good man.
I think he joined early Greek AA, as we call it.
GA, Greeks Anonymous.
If you're going to use those herbs, Amphiaraus, at least share.
Ian brought such a great weight to his role
and such a great voice to his role, too. He has a very distinct voice.
Tonight, a spear of flame will pierce my heart.
And he grabbed this role right by the throat.
My time.
Reece Ritchie plays my nephew, the famed storyteller Iolaus.
I tell of Hercules' Twelve Labors,
like the Nemean Lion, the Apples of the Hesperides,
the Belt of Hippolyta.
He is the ancient salesman, really.
Quite a crass way to put it.
But his function is to sell the sizzles, not the sausage.
-It's just the noise in the room. -I like the level.
Just bring back the enthusiasm and all that.
The litmus test is my mom.
So, in terms of, when she comes on set, she's like, "Who's your nephew?"
Said, "There he is, over there."
She's looking, she's like, "He can totally be related to you."
"Yeah, Mum. You think so? All right. You passed."
Atalanta is an Amazonian queen.
I would call her more Hercules' protector.
It's stressful, too.
The pressure is on.
There's so many people, and it's so huge.
Being the only woman in Hercules' group
requires a certain type of actress.
She can bring the ass-kicking.
And she has to look the part.
Her body was ridiculous.
In the middle of the night, 3:00 in the morning we're on set,
she's doing push-ups, lateral raises to bring up her delts.
It's a mental challenge.
Very strict diet, for example, that's new to me. I love food.
Aksel Hennie's one of the great actors.
I describe him as, like, the De Niro and the Pacino in one, of Norway.
I love the fact that you have this character
that has all these feelings and emotions and all this rage,
and he's not able to express it verbally.
His axes do the talking for him, so he doesn't talk.
But he's very valuable in the corner.
My make-up artist came up with a nose,
I was so skeptical about it, I said, "No, it's not gonna happen."
Tried it on a couple of times and suddenly I forgot that it was there.
And also with the wig,
when I saw the wig the first time, it looked like a dead rat.
I was, like, "Is that going on my head? Don't think so."
It was on, with the nose and everything, and, there he was.
Suddenly you get the character. Suddenly you see him.
The training for the film was months and months and months.
We were literally all thrown into a gym every day,
and we did physical training together.
It's a constant fine-tuning of the diet and the training every day.
Train twice a day, sometimes three times a day.
You might think it's kind of pointless,
because no matter how many press-ups you do,
in the end when you end up standing next to Dwayne Johnson,
it does diminish the sense of achievement slightly.
The most fun thing about doing an action film like this
is the pre-production phase,
when you practice on what you're gonna do in the film.
Each character has its own individual weapons or style,
which I thought was quite cool.
Then we try and adapt a style
that matches them and matches the weapons
and obviously matches the genre of the film.
Then we take that and we show Brett
to make sure that he's happy with that particular style.
We started out with more like a martial art feel of it,
and Brett didn't want that.
He wanted more directness and realness of it.
It's more of a bar fight.
I'm very lucky 'cause Ingrid's very good, Ingrid's a natural.
We try to do a minimum of an hour every day
because the muscles that you use in archery,
you don't use for anything else.
And you have to train them to retentive memory.
Much of it is muscle memory.
So you have to just do it so many times so that your body does it automatically
when the pressure is on and the camera is rolling.
Bring the chariots!
I ride horses. I love riding horses. But very different riding a chariot.
We rehearsed on this track, my God!
My balls were going to be in my throat
by the time I shook up and down on this chariot long enough.
-Not bad? -Very good.
But anyway, we worked it out the other day.
We've done a lot of chariot riding now, it's pretty good, works out pretty well.
That's fun.
They strapped me in the chariot, so I knew that I couldn't fall off.
But still the stunt coordinator said,
"We need to put you on a quick release because the chariot, it might tip."
"Okay, so, where is the quick release? What should I pull in case it tips?"
"It's right there. You just yank it like this."
"Okay. Shoot it then already."
But I felt completely safe.
But it's this thing again of making things look effortless.
That's a bit of a skill.
You start to fall in love with these characters as a group.
It's not just Hercules and his gang, it's the gang.
So, Hercules is part of this group.
And it's reminiscent of The Magnificent Seven,
it's reminiscent of The Wild Bunch.
It's reminiscent of these great movies where you fall for these characters
of tremendous depth, emotion and individuality.
Such a wonderful cast to lean on.
It's something that I've appreciated the most I think, with this project.
I'm very much enjoying it. And I'm enjoying the dynamic.
Because everyone gets on in a way that makes it more fun than it could be.
It's been so wonderful to get to know them,
and I think it's so much easier to create this story that
we are this family. "We only have each other."
That's what Atalanta says.
"We don't have anyone else. We have each other.
We are more than friends. We are family."
And that's very easy when you have guys like that.