Cosmopolitan

So tell me all about your character.
I play Marcus. He's a Roman soldier whose father was the leader of the 9th Legion, and essentially his father took his Legion, 17 years ago into the north of Britain - which is now Scotland - and they disappear. Cut back to 17 years after, and I've now been sent to Britain on my commission as a soldier trying to essentially win back my family's honour. I can't do it as a soldier, so I decide to go over Hadrian's Wall and try to figure out what happened to my father and if I can, bring back the Eagle or face death. I take a tribesman, a Scottish slave essentially - even though it wasn't Scotland back then - played by Jamie Bell, and we see things very differently.

It seems very historically accurate.
Yeah, [director] Kevin [Macdonald] is obsessed with accuracy. He is a documentary maker. A lot of directors take a lot of creative license just for dramatic sake and it ends up looking phony. Audiences are smarter than you give them credit for sometimes and people don't really get it. People know a lot about Rome because so many movies have been made about it, so many documentaries and we learn about them at school. If you just do a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-type version of it, people are going to be a little disenchanted. The Romans were some of the most advanced yet simple and driven people that you could ever, ever find in history.

How was it learning to fight like a Centurian?
It's really eye-opening. The short sword is specifically made to be thrust in and up into your sternum. That's what it was made for and that's why they really excelled in hand-to-hand combat because back then, the Germanic tribes, even the Britons, they all had long swords and big long axes, so we could get in close and really be effective.

Can you talk about doing all of the stunts yourself, and did you sustain any injuries?
I didn't sustain any injuries during the fighting, other than I thought I had broken my hand for a second but I just sprained it pretty bad. You just get bangs and bruises here and there. But I had a pretty bad burn injury in the river - that was pretty serious.

How did you get burnt?
They were pouring water down our wetsuits to keep us warm because we were in a hypothermic river all day for 13 hours, for about three or four days. We had been doing this for 13 hours and this poor guy was having to run up and down the hill, about every ten minutes with a huge bottle of water. We'd wrapped the day and I started to walk up and here he comes with the bottle of water to warm me up; he pours it down my wetsuit and it was boiling water. What had happened was that he hadn't got all the way down to the river to dilute the boiling water with the cold water, so it was pretty painful.

So can you talk about the relationship between this Roman leader and his slave? It's a very powerful relationship.
You know, at that time Rome was occupying a country and doing it without apologies. They were conquerors, that's what they did. They did it in the name of Rome but with the idea that these people needed what Rome was. And that is a pretty warped mentality, when people are very happy with how they are, but for some reason, someone comes in and thinks they need the Roman way of life. It's not so political and it's not so humanitarian. They would kill as many people as you could possibly kill if that's what it took, for Rome. I think that Marcus absolutely had this all-or-nothing mentality for Rome, because he felt he needed to essentially prove himself. His father was sort of a disgrace, so he had to be the perfect one and I think he was too committed in a way. He has to learn on the way, why and how he is seen through Esca's eyes.

How was it working with Jamie Bell?
Jamie is… I keep saying it, but him and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are maybe two of the best young actors that are in our age group. They are so incredibly smart, they can do everything and they are just so thoughtful and they care so much about it.