Nick E. Tarabay was in France when he got a text message from veteran showrunner Steven S. DeKnight, the man he spent years working with in the early 2010s on Starz’s Spartacus franchise playing Ashur, a turncoat slave and gladiator that audiences loved to hate.
Ashur had met his end in 2013’s Spartacus: Vengeance, but the character never truly left DeKnight’s mind, which is why he picked up the phone to ask Tarabay a question. “He was like, ‘Nick, what are you doing for the next five to six years?” recalled the actor.
DeKnight pitched Tarabay on playing Ashur once more in a new revisionist history series that imagines what would have happened had Ashur lived. Thankfully, the actor gave a resounding “yes” to DeKnight’s pitch, and the series, Spartacus: House of Ashur, now premieres Dec. 5 on Starz. And just like the initial series that debuted back in 2010, the show brings back slow-motion blood-letting, orgies galore, and plenty of sudsy soap opera machinations.
DeKnight and Tarabay recently came together for a lively conversation at the London Hotel for the very first Heat Vision Live event — a screening and Q&A series hosted by The Hollywood Reporter with a focus on all things great about genre film and television. And House of Ashur certainly fits that bill with sword-clashing, trident-piercing, hammer-smashing action sequences paired with visually-flourishing storytelling. (Watch the full conversation, moderated by THR senior film writer and creator of the Heat Vision blog Borys Kit, at the top of this post.)
In an era in which TV feels a little tamer, the series is boundary-pushing as ever, with its sex and violence. DeKnight said that he hasn’t found a boundary he isn’t willing to cross and received support from Starz, as well as producer Lionsgate TV. In fact, after a certain, um, dismemberment near the end of episode two, ” I was sure we were going to get a note about that,” he recalled. Instead? “Nothing.”
“This time in ancient Rome was a brutal, brutal time and hypersexual,” said DeKnight, who is particularly proud of the show’s introduction of a female gladiator. “I’m very thankful to Lionsgate and Starz that I have not gotten a note that said, ‘Whoa, can you pull it back?’”
DeKnight struck a defiant tone when it was suggested a parents group could become agitated due to all the sex and violence.
“I welcome a parents advisory out for blood,” he said , aughing.
Still, ideas about sexuality and performer safety have evolved since Spartacus bowed in 15 years ago, before intimacy coordinators became commonplace on big productions. “I come from a theater world where we didn’t have an intimacy coordinator. We would just talk about it. ‘What are you OK with? What are you not OK with?’” Tarabay said. The House of Ashur set employed intimacy coordinators for performers who wanted them. Tarabay continued, “Bringing that in is great for the new generation. That’s awesome. But also being nude, after a while, it becomes easy. It becomes just another scene.”
During the Q&A, Tarabay came off as a boisterous, fun-loving sort of guy, revealing he relishes fight training, which for the show included a month of gladiator camp, comprised of four hours of training a day, “from weapons to jiujitsu, to grappling, to wrestling, to CrossFit,” he said.
But one line Tarabay wouldn’t cross is changing the lines on set. The show is known for a certain style of speaking and a specific diction. DeKnight describes is as “Shakespeare meets Conan the Barbarian.” Each word was written with painstaking precision by DeKnight and his writer’s room, crafted to give the sense that you are in another time, even if it’s not accurate to how the Romans actually spoke.
“The dialogue’s so specific, it’s got to be word for word,” said DeKnight, who recalled being on set and noticing when an actor dropped a single word. “When it’s improvised or wrong, it’s like a record skipping. You can tell something wasn’t quite right.”
Even before the new show has premiered, DeKnight has committed himself to telling more Ashur’s story. Tarabay revealed that season two is already written. And the showrunner explained, “I always plan series out from five to seven seasons. So we’ve got a lot of story and a lot of places to take Ashur.”
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