Warning: This post contains spoilers for Gladiator II.
You don’t notice one of the most important characters in Gladiator II until late in the runtime of Ridley Scott’s latest feature, out Nov. 22. That is partly because he is not played by one of the movie’s big stars: Pedro Pascal, Paul Mescal, or Denzel Washington. In fact, he is not even human.
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He is a monkey named Dundus, and he’s the secret hero of this brutal blockbuster.
Dundus (played by a female monkey named Sherry, in her film debut) is a pet belonging to the Emperor Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), and he plays a shockingly pivotal role in the latter half of the film. Dundus’ presence is very funny—he’s a monkey, after all—but also revealing. In Scott’s movie about human bloodlust and the desire for power, it’s telling that a primate briefly ends up on top.
Dundus first starts to capture the audience’s attention when Washington’s conniving Macrinus, an arms dealer who owns a number of gladiators, convinces Caracalla to murder his co-leader and brother Geta (Joseph Quinn). While Geta and Caracalla are ostensibly supposed to share power, it’s Geta who is the slightly more competent of the two, talking down to Caracalla who just wants to watch fights and go to parties. Caracalla is like an overgrown child, riddled with syphilis, who relies on the friendship of Dundus, who he dresses up in little outfits like a small child.
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One day, Macrinus finds Caracalla cowering under a table with Dundus after being scolded by his sibling. It’s the perfect moment to whisper proverbial poison in the emperor’s ear. After Caracalla does Macrinus’ bidding, murdering his brother, Macrinus expects that the easily manipulated Caracalla will name him his right hand man. Well, he doesn’t.
Instead, Caracalla names his first counsel to be Dundus, making the primate, for a brief moment, one of the most powerful beings in the Roman Empire. Sure, Macrinus gets the job of second counsel, and basically runs things because, well, Dundus is a monkey. But even he is forced to say “Hail Dundus” when Caracalla instructs him to.
Caracalla is based on a real figure; Dundus, as far as I can tell, is not. But Ridley Scott as well as screenwriter David Scarpa aren’t really going for complete historical accuracy here. (Were there sharks in the Colosseum? No.) Still, Dundus’ presence actually reveals a lot about Scott’s interests as a filmmaker.
Scott has long enjoyed making men in positions of power look like utter fools. In the first Gladiator, Joaquin Phoenix’s villain Commodus is more petulant than threatening, only terrifying in his irrationality. More recently, in 2021’s The Last Duel, Scott put Ben Affleck in a blonde wig and goatee to play an absurd medieval count who is largely interested in partying rather than providing for his subjects. And, last year, Scott turned Napoleon (Phoenix, again) into a pratfalling baby man, who shouts lines like, “you think you are so great because you have boats,” a reference to his loathing of the English.
Despite being known for sci-fi masterpieces like Alien and Blade Runner, as well as lavish historical epics, Scott actually has an enormous sense of humor. One only needs to hear Jared Leto’s thick Italian accent in House of Gucci to see that, or notice how many punchlines Affleck lands in The Last Duel. And for as much as a film like Gladiator II glorifies masculinity, with the bulging muscles of Pascal and Mescal and the talk of honor, it also shows how ridiculous men can be. And Dundus is just the latest way in which Scott has transformed a famed man of history like Caracalla into a silly little boy.
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Hechinger spoke to this in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, explaining that Scott both genuinely loves animals and finds parallels between them and the “human animalistic ways in which our society is built.” The Rome of Gladiator II is purposefully over the top, using the backdrop of the ancient world as a way to examine how petty people have always been.
Dundus, like all the creatures that are employed by Rome for entertainment, is an innocent thrown into this chaos, but unlike the rampaging rhino that attacks Mescal’s Lucius in the arena—Dundus is actually cute. He’s just a little fellow who perches on Caracalla’s shoulder and wears a leash. You laugh at his presence, and Caracalla’s obsession with him, while also thinking: This monkey should have a better life.
A short while after Dundus gets promoted to first counsel, Macrinus kills Caracalla, sticking a long needle in his ear. And that’s the end of Dundus’ story. The plot has to move on, and we never find out what becomes of him. We can only hope he went on to live a long and happy life doing monkey stuff and not being in charge of any sort of governing body. It’s what he deserves. Hail Dundus.