“Hail! Ego sum Quintus. Your friendly gladiator. People call me Q. I am from Roman Springs and I say to your tension: ‘Veni, vidi, vici.’” These were the first words I ever heard uttered by Julian Sands when we met 23 years ago. We were on the set of Mike Figgis’s experimental film Timecode, an unusual endeavour that split the screen into quadrants with the actors improvising their dialogue. We were asked to invent our own characters. Julian chose to play a massage therapist who’d been sent as a promotion from a nearby Roman-themed spa to entice a group of Hollywood film execs to go there for a forthcoming company retreat. Quintus, the masseur, seemed to have arrived from another planet to seduce these paper pushers away from their quotidian lives and into a new reality where their imaginations could run wild and free. He stole one scene after another in shorts and sandals, spouting Latin maxims and manhandling suited office workers in terrifying and pleasure-inducing ways: headlocks, elbows to shoulder blades, fingers in ears. The character proved integral to the story but he existed apart from the rest, enigmatically operating in his own psychedelic world. He came from the outside and entered in as a disrupter, unsettling the action and challenging everyone to try to follow his unusual rhythms. In these ways, Quintus was indistinguishable from Julian and I decided we had to be friends.
