Last week Liam McIntyre received some of the most exciting news of his career, and some of the most difficult: he learned that he had just been cast in the title role in a cable series — but as the replacement for Andy Whitfield in “Spartacus: Blood and Sand.”
“It’s been the toughest thing,” Mr. McIntyre said in a telephone interview from his home in Melbourne, Australia. “Every actor dreams of getting a big break, a big opportunity. Andy’s such a wonderful actor. I don’t want to follow that guy, and everybody hurts that he’s had to give up the role, myself included.”
But the casting of Mr. McIntyre, a little-known Australian actor who will soon be carrying the second season of “Spartacus,” was necessitated after it was announced in the fall that Mr. Whitfield, who created the lead character in that hit Starz series about the Roman gladiator who eventually leads a slave rebellion, had had a recurrence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. More.