The day Oliver Reed grabbed me by the balls

I was very lucky to get a part in Gladiator and had a couple of scenes with Oliver Reed. I was basically a bit frightened of him. He had scared the life out of me as Bill Sykes [in Oliver!] and he had this reputation for being a hellraiser. I’d seen him on Michael Aspel and assumed he was a drunk. I didn’t know then that he had promised to be teetotal for the shoot – Spielberg and some of the other Dreamworks producers were worried about casting him – and hadn’t had a drink for months before filming started.

In the script Ollie was meant to punch me in the face and say: “You sold me queer giraffes.” I’d worked with some of the crew a few months before on The Mummy, and they knew I was scared of Ollie so they decided to play a trick on me. They thought it would be funny to get Ollie to grab me by the nuts during the scene.

Ollie said: “Do you mind if I really grab you hard, to make it authentic?” I said “fine”, so he did. Usually you do the scene, they say “cut”, and you have a few minutes to reset before you go again. Ollie continued to hold my nuts during the reset. I was so frightened of him that I thought it was part of his acting process, so I allowed him to hold me while we talked about the food in the hotel.

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By take three I became aware of a massaging sensation. By take four he said: “You do realise this is a wind-up, don’t you?” Everyone thought it was so funny they kept it in the final cut and he didn’t have to punch me. The film got an Oscar, Russell Crowe got an Oscar, Ollie got a posthumous Oscar. I got a partial erection.

After that we got on very well, and he told me his life story. He was a very benign presence, with these piercing blue eyes. He would always leave a pause after you spoke, to be sure you had finished what you wanted to say – he couldn’t stand people who interrupted. And his work was of the highest order. He had such gravitas. I don’t think anyone else could have played that role.

Right from the start there was a feeling that we were working on a very special film. My first scene began with a camera push-in on Reed, and I remember Ridley Scott saying: “We’ve got one second of dead-time. I need a midget or a dog.” Someone came forward with both. I thought: “My God, that’s the forensic level of detail we’re working with here.”

Scott never gave directions to actors and in the downtime I once asked him why. He just said, with a cigar in his mouth: “If you’re cast in a Ridley Scott film you don’t need direction.” I looked at Ollie and he winked at me as if to say: “Join the club.”

Ollie died a few weeks later. Everyone said he went the way he wanted, but that’s not true. It was very tragic. He was in an Irish bar in Malta and was pressured into a drinking competition. He should have just left, but he didn’t.

Omid Djalili Live 2016 runs from 1 March - 14 May (omidnoagenda.com)