Russell Crowe was meant to reprise his role in Nick Cave‘s cancelled Gladiator sequel, director Ridley Scott has revealed.

• READ MORE: ‘Gladiator 2’ review: back to Rome for Paul Mescal’s Colosseum-sized sequel

In the 2000 epic, Crowe portrayed Maximus, a Roman general turned brave Colosseum fighter who expires at the end of the film. However, according to Ridley Scott, Crowe wanted to be brought back for a planned sequel, which was at the time being penned by musician Nick Cave.

Scott recalled to PEOPLE: “Russell and I had a go at it around 18 years ago. I had Nick Cave writing the script and I kept saying [to Russell], ‘But you’re dead.’ And he said, ‘I know I’m dead. And I want to come back from the dead.’”

Scott then said that Cave’s workaround for resurrecting Crowe’s Maximus was through “a portal”: “The only way of doing it was to go to another battle and through a dying warrior, he comes back into the spirit of the warrior. So that’s his portal.”

However, Crowe reportedly rebuked the idea because it would mean a different actor will be playing the resurrected version of Maximus: “He said, ‘So that’s no fucking good, is it?’ It didn’t really work.”

Per a 2018 report from the BBC, Nick Cave’s Gladiator II would have opened with Maximus in the afterlife, where he meets several fallen Roman deities. They ask for him to kill the god Hephaestus and in return would be reunited with his dead wife and son. At some point during his journey, Maximus is zapped back into the world of the living, some two decades after his death.

Now, 23 years after the release of the original, Gladiator II has gone in a different direction, starring Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington and Pedro Pascal among others. In the film, Mescal plays Lucius, the young boy from the 2000 film.

In a three-star review, NME described Gladiator II as a “Colosseum-sized sequel” to the first film, adding: “If you loved Gladiator, it’s odds-on you’ll enjoy this too. It’s got all of the same exciting bits – swordfighting, rousing speeches, nasty poshos getting what they deserve. The problem is that’s all it gives you. You want to feel like you’re watching Maximus lift off his helmet and deliver that iconic monologue for the first time again.

“You want the thrill of a core memory being unlocked. You want to know you’ll be quoting Mescal’s lines to your mates in the pub for the next 10 years. Gladiator 2, piously respectful as it is, can only offer a faded memory of that experience. There was a dream that was Rome – and this is kind of it.”

Meanwhile, Scott has said that he’s been considering another sequel. He told France’s Premiere magazine, “No seriously! I’ve lit the fuse. The ending of Gladiator 2 is reminiscent of The Godfather with Michael Corleone finding himself with a job he didn’t want, and wondering, ‘Now, father, what do I do?’ So the next [film] will be about a man who doesn’t want to be where he is.”