Welcome back to the arena. There have been some changes while you were gone.
Spartacus: House of Ashur dropped its first trailer during Saturday’s Comic-Con panel, showing off Nick E. Tarabay’s return as Ashur and the introduction of the first female gladiator.
Spartacus creator Steven DeKnight already gave Entertainment Weekly the inside scoop on how he settled on the concept for the show, which is a revisionist history that imagines what would’ve happened if Ashur didn’t die on Mt. Vesuvius and instead took over the gladiator school from Batiatus (John Hannah).
The trailer now shows Ashur, a former slave, struggling to be accepted by high society. So he decides to make his mark by introducing “a sight never before witnessed in the arena.”
Tenika Davis (Wrong Turn) debuts as Achillia, a gladiatrix, i.e. female gladiator. She becomes a spectacle in the gladiatorial matches, but first she, too, must fight for the respect of the male gladiators. The trailer shows her in action, performing acrobatic flips mid-air in the arena.
“We wanted to bring in the female gladiators, but historically they didn’t appear in ancient Rome until about 100 years later,” DeKnight previously told EW. “This time around, Ashur upsets history and introduces the female gladiator 100 years early.”
On Achillia, the showrunner said, “She’s just as driven, just as dangerous as the men. One of the things we wanted to do on this show is, of course, have all those great staples of the original — the sex, the intrigue, the violence, the complicated twists and turns — but also offering something new. One of those main pillars were the gladiatrices.”
STARZ
‘Spartacus: House of Ashur’
The trailer also confirms Spartacus: House of Ashur will arrive on Starz this winter, though specific timing is still unknown.
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Tarabay, Davis, Graham McTavish (The Witcher), Jamaica Vaughan (Home and Away), Jordi Webber (Choose Love), and Jaime Slater (Jupiter’s Legacy) all joined DeKnight for the Spartacus: House of Ashur Comic-Con panel. And although DeKnight told EW that Spartacus himself is still dead in the timeline of this successor show, Liam McIntyre, who played the role on the previous Vengeance and War of the Damned seasons of the original drama, returned to moderate the conversation.
Watch the trailer above.
Check out more of EW’s coverage from San Diego Comic-Con 2025.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
