“Betrayed by the Romans. Forced into slavery. Reborn as a Gladiator. The classic tale of the Republic’s most infamous rebel comes alive in the graphic and visceral new series, Spartacus: Blood and Sand. Torn from his homeland and the woman he loves, Spartacus is condemned to the brutal world of the arena where blood and death are primetime entertainment. But not all battles are fought upon the sands. Treachery, corruption, and the allure of sensual pleasures will constantly test Spartacus. To survive, he must become more than a man. More than a gladiator. He must become a legend.”
The world of gladiators comes to life as the Roman Republic’s most brutal fighters clash in the ultimate arena. “Spartacus: Blood and Sand” is a new television series that has just started airing in the United States and Canada.
The series follows Spartacus (Andy Whitfield), a Thracian warrior captured by Romans, is enslaved into a gladiator training Ludus (school) owned by Batiatus (John Hannah) and his wife Lucretia (Lucy Lawless). He is forced to fight daily for his life against deadly foes. Against all odds, Spartacus’ rebellious instincts, his intense love for his wife Sura (Erin Cummings) and his powerful fighting skills drive him to win a series of near-impossible battles.
The series is a reimagining of the story of Spartacus, who led a slave revolt against the Roman Republic in the second century BC.
Steven S. DeKnight, one of the executive producers of the series, says that although “Spartacus: Blood and Sand” is grounded in history, “None of us are saying that this is history. We’re not making a documentary. At the end of the day, we’re making a show that is entertaining. So, we take touchstones from history but, much like 300 and Gladiator, we bend history for dramatic effect.
“The great thing about Spartacus is before he broke out from the gladiator training school, very little was known about him. There were only fragments and they’re conflicting. Like: was he Thracian? Was he not Thracian? Some accounts say he was Roman, some say he joined the Roman auxiliary. Some say Spartacus wasn’t even his real name, that Spartacus is actually the name of a Thracian king that they gave to him. So, the past is wide open. We looked at all those fragments and took the best of them. In one fragment he has a wife who was a prophetess and she has a vision that tells her he is destined for great unfortunate things. I loved that, so we based his wife Sura on that.”
Andy Whitfield says of his character: “Spartacus is regular guy who lives in a village, loves his family and supports them. Then he’s captured and forced to have all the values he holds dear conflicted because this supposedly civilized society has got the weirdest, most vain, superficial values that he just doesn’t understand. He’s this beast of the heart: his driving force is to get his wife back. She represents everything that he holds dear, and he will fight, and fight, and fight until that ‘civilized’ society is overcome.”
For Whitfield, the story of “Spartacus: Blood and Sand” is “a timeless concept. It hasn’t changed since the beginning of time. People still get hurt by other people. The setting is kind of irrelevant to the drama and the connection of these human beings. It’s a crazy world right now, and you read the scripts and think, ‘Man, things were tough back in 73 B.C.’ But I don’t know if it was any worse than now. So I think people can identify with the weight of what goes on for these people.”
While the emotional focus of “Spartacus: Blood and Sand” lies in the characters and their close-up interaction, the excitement of the action is intensified by the ‘graphic novel brought to life’ style in the vein of the movies 300 or Sin City.
Director and consulting producer Grady Hall adds, “It’s a different kind of storytelling. To do a graphic novel in motion means to have the style directly reflect the emotions and themes of the story in a very visual way. So, in that way it’s like nothing else on television, it gives viewers something they can’t get anywhere else, and that’s the core.”
