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

Of course, as ruler of Rome in the year 79 Ce, the victor of the infamous Year of the Four Emperors was for all practical purposes 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 considered our greatest living actor all the more fitting.

“It was a big, big production,” Hopkins says of the epic-scale July 18-launching series on Peacock from the Independence Day helmer. “It’s good.”

In fact, as the NBCUniversal streamer prepares for the Paris Olympics later this month, the 10-espiode first season of Those About to Die puts the power and prestige of competition into a grand perspective. A gladiatorial perspective that offers with a cast including Game of Thrones vet Iwan Rheon,...