WARNING: spoilers for Spartacus: House of Ashur episode 8 ahead.
Spartacus: House of Ashur might technically be ancient history, but I don't know whether I'm coming or going from week to week. I'd just got my head around the Brothers Ferox being behind Opiter's (Arlo Gibson) death in episode 6, before Satyrus (Leigh Gill) is the only one left alive in episode 7... but we've moved on at lightning speed.
In Spartacus: House of Ashur episode 8, the main focus has shifted. Ashur (Nick E. Tarabay) is upsetting every woman around him because of his blossoming feelings for Viridia (India Shaw-Smith), and Achillia (Tenika Davis) is slowly on her way back to full strength. However, it's Celadus (Dan Hamill) and Tarchon (Jordi Webber) who you need to be keeping an eye on.
While Tarchon feels threatened by Achillia and seeks to ruin her return to glory, Celadus severs the pair's bond once he gets wind of Tarchon's behavior. The two then have to enter the gladiator arena at the end of episode 8, and only one of them leaves alive.
For Hamill and Webber, it was a monumental episode in completely different ways. But for one star, their fictional death was "really hard and a little traumatic" to process.
Celadus' shock death in Spartacus: House of Ashur episode 8 'didn't require any acting techniques whatsoever'
"I'm not gonna lie about this... it sucked," Hamill explained about filming Celadus' death. "It was really hard and a little bit traumatic. I had to convince my nervous system that I was done. There's a lot of different acting techniques, but for this one, we didn't need any. We could flick into these people's time and space, and so it was real. So I felt a bit shook after.
"It's really tricky to make your nervous system feel like it's going to die. But to be fair, there's a lot of pressure on this thing. We're honoring a legacy, and to do it half-hearted, we'd kick ourselves. It's also a pleasure to be able to access those things and to do it in an arena with 350 people. This is the biggest physical flex we've ever had, but we also had to be emotional athletes.
He continues, "To keep doing it take after take for hours on end was an actor's dream workout. But I definitely had to take myself on holiday and self-soothe and get things [out of] my system. It was a lot."
When the episode closes out, and Celadus is left on the floor in a pool of blood, the sorrow is real. But it's also worth digging deeper into why he held back and invited death in – and it's all to do with the House of Proculus' female gladiator.
Bought to take Achillia on in battle, Celadus sees their romance reflected in her eyes, unable to bring himself to fight. It's a completely different story from Tarchon's time in the arena, who tries to avenge the accidental death of a Roman civilian who falls into the pit.
"It was glory, but it was clouded," Webber tells me. "It was everything that I'd wanted, but I couldn't have a genuinely happy moment of having proven myself, like I did this. But then there were also multiple things happening at the time. I had love on my mind. I just executed this master plan with a lot of Roman guards around me. So it's just like, 'well, actually, I don't know if I'm going to die or not.'
"There's too many big things going on in my life right now to really just revel in that," he adds, and boy, did he not realize the half of it. How Tarchon and Achillia each cope with the loss of Celadus will be revealed in Spartacus: House of Ashur episode 9... but I'm going to guess now that it's not great.
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