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“Now I'm ready to become a god,” says Anthony Hopkins as Emperor Vespasian in Those About to Die, directed by Roland Emmerich.

Of course, the victor of the infamous Year of the Four Emperors, as ruler of Rome in 79 AD, was in practice a god on earth. Which makes the portrayal of the former general who built what we now call the Colosseum by an 86-year-old Welshman, widely regarded as our greatest living actor, all the more fitting.

“It was a big, big production,” Hopkins says of the epic series that debuts July 18 on Peacock from the Independence Day director. “It’s good.”