When you've got Russell Crowe in the room, one subject is inevitable, and that's Gladiator. What you don't always expect is the story of how he helped beat the “fuckin’ rubbish” script into shape.
Appearing on stage with GQ’s deputy global editorial director Adam Baidawi at GQ Heroes 2024, the Academy Award-winning actor went deep into the unlikely origin story of the greatest blockbuster of all time.
First off, he had no end of plaudits to shower on his now 86-year-old director, Sir Ridley Scott. “He’s monumental as an artistic brain… I mean, he’s spectacular to work with,” said Crowe. “The five films that I’ve done with him, I did because of really good, strong reasons. We have a great relationship.”
But back to that stinker of a screenplay. “You’re reading it and going, ‘Oh, fuck off,’”said Crowe. “My agent was like, ‘Well, come on, convince yourself there’s something positive about it, because [Scott] wants to meet you…’ It really wasn’t a script. It was just an idea. But not even a good idea.”
Their first meeting went pretty well, even if Crowe was bald and “45, 50 pounds over what [his] normal weight would be,” having recently shot 1999’s The Insider. “I could see on his face, he was like…” Crowe said, imitating Scott’s grimace.
Then it was down to business. “At a certain point, everybody else left the room, and I said, ‘The script’s shit.’ [Scott] goes, ‘Listen, I think we can make it better. They’ve given us the resources, we’ve got $100 million.’ So I agreed to go on the journey,” Crowe went on. “[But it] was one of my first experiences of the expectation of the studio, and having studio people involved in the process of developing what you’re doing. And they were fuckin’ not very smart.”
So, when the assembled executives didn't even know who Marcus Aurelius was — “a character in the fuckin' movie, who very famously wrote a few books about stoicism” — Crowe went down to the local bookstore, bought half a dozen copies of Meditations, and dished them out like punches in the Colosseum. “I came back and [said], ‘Fuckin’ read this,’” he said.
“You might be picking up: I'm rather blunt. And when I'm confronted with stupidity like that, I don't deal with it very well. You're fucking telling me you're gonna spend $100 million on a subject you don't know anything about?”
Eventually, Crowe would just arrive at the office after everyone else had left, “and Ridley and I would start working on the script,” he said. “And sometimes [we would] work until two, three, four in the morning. And we really enjoyed each other's company, and that ideas are bouncing around; we really started to give it some morality, and some fibre, and some strength.” The gods thank you, Russell, for such gladiatorial effort.
Crowe opened GQ Heroes 2024 at his blunt best, and opted for a casual fit, dressing down in an Adidas track jacket and jeans. After tearing it up on screen and stage, Crowe is a literal rockstar nowadays; this past weekend, he even played Glasto. So you’d forgive him for being, in his words, “Just a little bit south of fuckin’ exhausted.” Not that you could tell over the next 40-odd minutes, when he regaled us with brilliant anecdotes from a life in film and song. (And yes, we laughed our arses off.)