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BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Ray Stevenson is huge. Well, big, anyway.
But he's going to be huge.
In one of television's emerging patterns this year, HBO is going back to ancient Rome next month with a 12-episode drama called Rome. It's deadly politics, rowdy bar fights, epic battle scenes, blood, backstabbing, and lots and lots of gettin' nekkid.
Call it Deadwoodicus.
In the middle is Stevenson. Six feet, 4 inches tall, 225 pounds, and powerfully built. He's kind of George Clooney on steroids. By the time Rome completes its run, the Irish-born English actor will probably be a star, and a very real candidate to replace Russell Crowe when Hollywood gets tired of that actor's notoriously bad behavior.
But on Friday night, amid toga-clad TV critics and surrounded by faux Roman ruins and waiters serving tuna tartare and lamb shanks at an HBO party, Stevenson had the time to talk with anyone who wandered by.
He came late to acting, he said, daring at age 27 to give up an interior design career that he liked in his hometown of Newcastle. He went to acting school.
"I've always wanted to create, to act, to be part of an art," he said. "I've just always known that."
He soon learned there was more to the game than acting.
"It's all about meeting the right people," he said. "That took a bit."
Now 41, it only took him 14 years to become an overnight success. Rome is his first really big role, after working as a London stage and TV journeyman. His biggest Hollywood role before Rome was playing Dagonet in last year's film King Arthur.
For a first monster role, his portrayal of brawling soldier Titus Pullo is a knockout.
Rome is epic in scope. HBO footed the bill to send an all-British cast, in partnership with the BBC, to Italy for a 14-month shoot. The sets are massive. The cast includes hundreds, maybe thousands, of extras, clad in period garb, smashing each other with swords and spears and clubs. The result is mesmerizing.
At its heart, Rome is a buddy picture set in turbulent times. Stevenson's character and the character of Lucius Vorenus, played by Kevin McKidd, are soldiers returning from the battles in Gaul around 52 B.C. to find Roman general Gaius Julius Caesar in a power struggle. The two form a friendship in a blast furnace of political upheaval.
"Everything that's around them is being turned into quicksand," Stevenson said. "The whole fabric of their lives and the structure of their society is completely mixing around. And in that, they formed a kind of interdependency almost. That's where their reality is. It's very human."
Desperate for a new watercooler show to pick up the burden from The Sopranos, as both Carnivale and Six Feet Under fade, HBO hasn't committed to a second season for Rome yet. But the door is open, network executives say.
They can only hope viewers don't mix up Rome with ABC's tepid toga party Empire, which is currently airing and was filmed at about the same time as Rome. The casts ran into each other after work in Roman bars and restaurants, but the actors said they never considered themselves in competition.
They were right, there's no competition. Empire failed; Rome rules.
But why make either? While viewers this fall are being fed a diet of science fiction (it's being called "speculative drama" now) riding the popularity of ABC's Lost, one of the subcurrents appears to be ancient Rome. It's apparent there's a trend brewing when the History Channel jumps in with a special, Rome: Engineering an Empire.
"It was a moment in history that's pivotal in Western history," Rome producer Bruno Heller said. "If things hadn't turned out the way they did at that particular point, the world that we live in now would be very different. And it was a gold age of literature and art, so it lives on in a very resolute way still today. It's the transformation of a republic into an empire. I think America is dealing with that issue now."
Project historical consultant Jonathan Stamp echoed that theme, that the United States may be grappling with some of the issues of centralized power and a role in the world that Rome went through.
"Bruno's right there when he says there's something particularly resonant about that particular point in Roman history, just now, and maybe particularly here in the United States," he said. "You're looking at a point in the city's history when it's wrestling with all the problems of whether or not it should expand, have an empire; how you mix power and responsibility, all sorts of things that have tremendous resonance for contemporary American experience."
Big picture issues are nice. Reflecting the American experience is nice. But there's another reason, Stamp allowed.
"In practical terms, perhaps another of the things that's contributing to it is the enormous success of Gladiator. Just in commercial times, I think it made it evident that you could do something epic and Roman and achieve enormous success with it."
Funny he should mention Gladiator. Wasn't Russell Crowe in that? Russell who?