Russell Crowe Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

it's a funny thing you know you get given the responsibility to tell somebody's story if it's true you've got to bust your balls for it you've got to go the extra mile this is somebody else's life you know and i feel that responsibility very heavily it's funny that you're making me very nostalgic just even talking about this sort of stuff obviously part of the process prompt stomper you know i read the script i found it very very difficult subject matter to deal with having grown up through the punk era you know i'd seen guys who were punks because of their their music preference or because of making a stand against corporate rock i'd seen some of those guys morph into neo-nazis i think i did probably five or six physical auditions for that before i was cast in the role very short shoot maybe 28 days so super intense you have to get into character very quickly you're working with a group of young guys and everybody's a bit afraid of it you know jackie mckenzie was the principal female lead she didn't know what she was getting into either you know she'd come just out of film school but it was the quality of the idea that you could attack such a heavy subject matter that was just so compelling and so attractive what the are you afraid of this is our place no more running we stop them here you know it ended up being quite an incredible calling card for me it went definitely went ahead of me and did its own work sometimes to my detriment though i probably had at least a dozen conversations with directors in los angeles who had somehow been told the story that i was in fact a skinhead who had been discovered on the streets dragged into the film world but that wasn't that wasn't the case at all the next choice that i made in terms of a commercial movie was to play a gay rugby playing plumber in a movie called the some of us i just always liked the idea that somebody who was into romper stomper for the wrong reasons saw that i was in another film bought a ticket and now they're sitting in front of some of us wondering how the they got there la confidential my process then was not to do smaller roles i was already doing roles where my name was above the title so i tried to stay in that pocket i got the call from curtis hanson he was really happy to find out that i had in fact done american movies already which would give him potentially an easier point of argument to the studio because his idea was to cast relative unknowns you know he sent me the script and i read the james elroy book la confidential and the thing that freaked me out was bob white is described as physically the biggest man in the los angeles police department i kind of got back on the phone with curtis we hadn't met yet i said man i don't know what impression you might have got from the movies that you've seen but you know i'm not really like a big bloke mate you know his vibe on that was that everything that he required and bud white he'd seen in other work and that was immaterial to him merry christmas merry christmas to you officer that obvious huh it's practically stamped on your forehead it was a weird situation because the big overarching studio in this studio directly making the movie um didn't like curtis's idea so i was flown in and i was put up at a hotel in the time we were supposed to be rehearsing but you know i've got you know friends in the business and stuff and people would be telling me that sean penn was going to be playing my role you know i was talking to the director and that was my character to play but at one point in time they stopped paying my hotel bill um and rental car bill stopped providing me with pedium and i really didn't have you know a lot in my life at the time so i wasn't able to pay for that level of hotel etc and so it got pretty heavy and to the point where you know there was a few times there where i was going down the back stairs so the hotel manager wouldn't stop me in the foyer and ask me what was going on i could feel all of that stuff around me and the only thing i had to go on was the surety of the director that he'd made his choice so i just went with that and i just kept turning up to work i think if there was ever a day where i got frustrated by it and i hadn't turned up to work that would have been the in the armor that they would have used to shift me out of the role you know and the same process happened with with guy with guy pierce why don't you go after criminals for a change instead of cops stensland got what he deserved and so will you curtis asked me about guy he was a regular character on a soap opera called neighbours that i dropped in on and did like a small character for two or three days i had a girlfriend i eventually ended up marrying some many many years later and i'm a very jealous person and we walked into this pub and a guy was there and he greeted her effusively and gave her a cuddle and a kiss and i'm sort of standing there he hasn't even acknowledged my existence at this point in time so i waited till there was a lull in their conversation and i stepped forward and i gave him a kiss and i behaved effusively like he was doing with danielle because why can't i join in and he didn't do anything he acknowledged with his eyes sorry mate that was a bit dicky of me to cut you out of the conversation and later on when i was talking to curtis and i told him that story and i told him how completely cool under fire guy pierce had been and i think that really fell into the part of guy that curtis had thought he'd seen in the auditions and so that's how we became that team in that movie [Music] the insider you know at the time definitely the most difficult job i've done i got contact by michael mann you know and and he asked me to fly down to los angeles and talk to him and he sent me the script and i read it and i couldn't work out what character that he wanted me to play because it was a script full of middle-aged men i rang him first and said i don't i don't get what character and he said the guy man the lead guy you know and i was like yeah that guy's he's 50 something i'm 30 something michael said look just come and see me come talk to me you know we had a very very long conversation without any fences and we talked about this and that to do with society and corporate malfeasance and blah blah blah and it was a great chat you know and i said to him look i uh i don't get why you want me to play this character i'm just i'm not the age i don't look anything like him michael sort of came around from behind his desk and he said listen man i didn't uh fly down here because of what he looked like and he put his hand on my chest he said i flew you down to meet you because of what you have in here and pushing that you know and it was like in that moment i was like i'm going to work with this guy i'm going to do anything he wants i'm going to climb any mountain so he really worked out who i was because he freaking got a hook in me very deeply you know jeffrey is you know a nice fella but he's kind of an uncomfortable fellow and he'd had a very strange journey you know where he begins in the bronx and ends up sort of working in japan and and doing all these things that that gave his voice such a crazy colorful array because you know now he's working in the tobacco industry for example and he's working in kentucky so as a scientist he's never used words connected to the tobacco industry so when he says those words they have a pronounced southern lilt but a lot of the time he has that bronx base but the bronx base is also infused with the fact that he spoke japanese for a number of years in his life so i'm looking at it going what the do i do with this you know it was a bit of a mind-blowing experience so what you're saying is it isn't enough that you fired me for no good reason now you question my integrity on top of the humiliation of being fired you threatened me you threatened my family it never crossed my mind not to honor my agreement i will tell you mr sanderfer and brown and williamson too me well you michael is such a perfectionist and he wants to really know what he has and what he's going for and stuff so you know one example my very young hair would just not sit like jeffrey weigan's old hair so we bleached it um the color came back we bleached it again color came back i think we ended up bleaching it seven times in a period of three weeks and then we started to shave the volume out of it you know my young hair would just go and it would be there the next day if we were going to do it that way we would have to be shaving my head in those areas every morning and and still no matter how much volume we cut out of my hair no matter how many undercuts and everything that we did one or two days later it would go and it would find a way to cover my head so we were standing doing a screen test and i was so pleased to find out that dante spanotti who i'd met first on the quick and the dead director of photography uh was on the insider as well because you know i had a great relationship with his camera crew guys and and i was really excited to know that that it was him and i was standing there and possibly a little offensive you know i said you know this is not working with the hair man you know i've got to get a wig i've got to have like really hair i've got to have hair like his and pointed at dawn too and dante's got lovely hair but it was just it was of this the right age you know and it was behaving in the way that jeffrey's hair behaved you know so we got an incredible wig maker with the wig it just made me feel like the character you know and that was like a bit it was quite a big thing for me because even when i'm doing the insider i'm still really formulating who i am as a film actor it's probably my what 16th or 17th movie by then that really showed me that because of the visual nature of film if somebody says you're going to play a pirate you know get an eye patch you know rent a parrot you might immediately feel more connected to the character of a pirate if you do so i did not feel i could play that role until i looked in the mirror and it looked like jeffrey now other times i've done characters where i feel i don't necessarily need to be accurate but because his story was so real because it had such a deep psychological effect on him and his family and because it was such an important step in the legal and cultural life of america i just felt this need to honor him and be very careful about honoring him so you know i met a whole bunch of fantastic actors in that job you know to be surrounded by people like al pacino and christopher plummer somebody from the film company at the time rang me to tell me that they were going to mount an academy award campaign on my behalf and i said oh cool you know so that's like me and al that's fantastic and they said no well we're going to put our emphasis on you and we asked mr pacino and he said back the kid it's a massive thing for him to have done did you mention my name you haven't talked to anybody about that why are brown williams and no i suppose how do i know about brother happened just after i talked like coincidence well i don't like paranoid accusation time came up later in my career it was the movie cinderella man paul giamatti's mum died during the course of shooting a cinderella man and i made her a promise on the phone that paul was such an incredible actor that he would be nominated and the studio asked me what i wanted to do and i said back the kid and paul giamatti got an academy award nomination so the insider is very very important for my growth as um an actor and uh also extremely important for the way my career went uh just after that cinderella man i'd worked with ron howard on a beautiful mind and i gave him the script and he said you know look i understand why you want to do it he said but i don't understand why i would want to direct it it's like ground so many people have covered you know i said to him well it's just like a beautiful mind man the importance of this story is that it's true this guy this what happened to him you know he was a boxer successful he owned a cab company well if you own that cab company in manhattan and wall street crashes in 1929 and people can't afford to take cabs it's possibly the only time in history that owning a cab company in manhattan has been a negative thing but so you know jim from going through his sporting career and rising to a certain middle-class position sank and slid all the way back to the bottom again and then out of pure desperation rose and became a champion and i just i'd fallen in love with that story when i first read it and it was super important to me and i think i was very passionate with ron describing why it was important so he came on board and you know it's just one of the nature of the film if he hadn't have come on board i probably don't make that film in the cycle of things if we had to start from scratch and find another director it probably reshapes you know i had a run of bad luck and uh this time around i know what i'm fighting for oh yeah what's that jimmy milk you know through the course of the process of that it was like a physically extremely tough role i've actually done more difficult physical roles since but at that time the preparation for that film and you know if i could show you a list of what we were doing on a daily basis it was heavy stuff and and you know ron is very serious director and he brought angelo dundee who trained 15 world champions into my life and angelo constructed the energy in the training camp and you know i mean sometimes you just just get so lucky having angelo dundee with all of his wisdoms and experiences come into my life as a mentor and you know i only knew him alive for eight years but what a joyful person he was what an inspirational person you know occasionally i would sort of just say i don't know how i'm gonna do this he just had a way of making you believe so it required an immense amount of discipline to play that character you know i was so into that world so into that place when i made the decision that because i'm playing a boxer at a certain point in time i would have a prosthetic nose and a certain point in time i would have cauliflowered prosthetic ears also because of the black and white photographs i'd seen a jim braddock he had very kind of wingnut ears you know poking out from the side of the head so we had these pieces made which pushed my ears out like that and um whoa it came to see me and he's like you know russell uh as a guy who grew up with ears like that i'm just wondering if we need to make that that kind of decision do we need to be that accurate i kind of saw what their problem was later on when they sort of were trying to market the movie every image you know even if it was a romantic image and they were focusing on the love story between uh my character and renee's character i got the nose i got the ears gladiator um after i'd finished the insider ridley and michael had a conversation i went to meet ridley i looked like absolute i don't see how he could possibly have seen me as a roman general but we really got on he had gigantic ideas and i kind of thought most of them were impossible really um and it certainly wasn't on the page there was no script that we could be enthused about but what i was enthused about was the simple idea it's 184 idea or 180 ad you're a roman general and you're being directed by ridley scott you know so that drove my motivation a lot you know it was very difficult putting on those clothes and going oh yeah off we go i'm a roman general and i know that joaquin phoenix had the same problem because we talked about it you know the heights that those characters had to go to you know it was and it's very different because at that stage you know if you're wearing clothes like that you're probably doing a comedy or a piss take you know sword and sandal things had been out of vogue for you know a long time that whole idea was constructed around the sincerity of the core journey of a man's vengeance for the death of his wife and child my name is maximus desmos meridius commander of the armies of the north general of the felix legions loyal servant to the true emperor marcus aurelius father to a murdered son husband to a murdered wife and i will have my venues in this life or the next it's funny though you see the backstage or behind the scenes footage and everybody's just goofing around and being silly and you know the reason you do that is you're saving all your serious for after the guy says action you know most people the complexities of film are such that you have to have everything organized to the nth degree your scheduling you know your purchasing your crewing all of these things have to be worked out and particularly with your art department and you know you set dresses and everything so everybody knows what they're doing that's the way you make a film however we were making a movie that grew as we made the movie and little things became big ideas and we were being fluid within that gigantic 100 plus million dollar budget shape which is all about schedules and disciplines and being exact about things even down to you know this one conversation um i had with ridley where i said i wanted to decapitate a guy you know and at the end of this fight sequence and he said well look you know i can't just add uh a decapitation um it's a pretty heavy thing i'm going to have to discuss it with the studio and everything and i said look this is the way the choreography goes at the moment and i showed him i said this is what i want to change it to and i showed him and he could see that it was more dynamic and more part of the character and the last move of that sequence was this decapitation you know and he's literally smoking a cigar he said what i've had to say he's watched it you know a couple of puffs on a cigar and he calls out to his first assistant director and he goes terry how many heads have we got left you know but working with ridley i always liken it to working with some great renaissance painter just the way he sees the world and that the level of artistry he converts onto the screen you know i've ended up making five movies with ridley and every single one of those experiences you know has got to be in my top 10 of films that i've made robin hood actually my first step on robin hood when the idea came up was grab every robin hood book that i could big bag of them and i got on a boat in northern queensland and just started to read so i just wanted to know what the mythology was as much of what i could find out and what it occurred to me and what i brought up with ridley was that we all have a reshaped view of robin hood which it comes from victorian times but in fact this legend started many many hundreds of years before then we started looking at the facts of the currently understood myth and the realities of the history timeline and always in stories of robin hood in a modern era king richard comes into the story he's been away on crusade and he comes into the story at the end of the story to sort of save the day you know confirm that robin is a good man and the sheriff of nottingham was incorrect and blah blah but what we discovered is that you know apart from a few months earlier in his life king richard was french he didn't make it back to england he went on crusades and he died in france that was our first hook it's like okay everybody else is expecting a robin hood where king richard comes in at the end to save the day our robin hood begins with the death of king richard who died putting a castle to siege in france you know and of course i got to work with the magnificent cate blanchett or la blanchett as i call her on that film and found out that you know not only is she a wonderful actress she's spectacular company as well i'm ashamed of you hello marion i've come to save you i remember standing on that set in the bourne wood the same place we'd shot certain parts of gladiator and i'm looking up the hill at this french castle that the art department have built on top of the hill and i'm looking around me hundreds of archers and we have 180 horses galloping down the beach this is probably the last physical production of this scale that i ever get to do you know things were changing so rapidly and it's it's proven to be that way now sure i've been on big budget films but not in that kind of scale where everything's built you know [Music] look the idea of this script was kind of nauseating when i first read it i really didn't think i i wanted to have anything to do with it but then you know somebody asked me actually why why are you not going to do it you know and it's like because it's really scary and it scares me that this is actually something that does happen this individual this character is acting on such a basis of a lack of humanity a lack of empathy and he is imploding and he's going to take her with him ma'am are you okay i'm pretty sure the guy in that truck's following me he's road raging why don't you just chill man go your way [Music] you know one of the things that was really important to me with this is that we don't at any stage try to justify his actions or his thought process because most of us will go through this sort of thing and be you know it's just the ups and downs and the foibles and quirks of life but this particular man um has uh decided that uh all of this adds up to his right to destroy and terrorize and we've seen that kind of personality at play i mean 20 years ago i would have in my mind kind of written itself as some kind of anomaly you know but that's the thing that kept playing on my mind when you you know school shootings and shootings and nightclubs but it is the same thought process and therefore it became more important to me and when i was particularly based off my conversations with derek and his perspective as a filmmaker i knew that this movie ends up not being just about thrills and crashes and violence this movie ends up being a direct commentary on the state of american society western society today so it went from being the thing i was most scared of to the thing i just felt most responsible to have to do so uh gq and those of you that have tuned in um that's the end of that i've been boring your tits off for quite some time now talking about some of my iconic characters iconic being somebody else's definition and i'm just the putz who has to say it but anyway i hope you got something out of it enjoy yourself and thank you gq

Channel: GQ

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Rating: 4.9309812 out of 5

Keywords: celebrity, iconic characters, iconic, russell crowe, russell crowe 2020, russell crowe interview, russell crowe gq, russell crowe iconic, russell crowe characters, russell crowe iconic characters, russell crowe movie, russell crowe movies, gq russell crowe, russell crowe gladiator, russell crowe robin hood, russell crowe unhinged, crowe, russell crowe cinderella man, russell crowe the insider, russell crowe romper stomper, russell crowe la confidential, gq, gq magazine

Id: VFoUXFxmnSM

Length: 25min 51sec (1551 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/riegspsych325]

Crowe looks like that uncle who settled very easily into his retirement, almost too much. He spends his time downing High Life’s and working on his 1970’s Mach 1 Mustang despite it already being in pristine condition. Classic rock plays in the radio but he changes it anytime Def Leppard comes on

[u/AMA_requester]

Kinda shitty of the studio behind LA Confidential to leave him twisting in the wind like that and not paying for his accommodations.

Also there’s like a handful of films I’m really surprised didn’t get talked about. The Quick and the Dead, A Beautiful Mind, Master and Commander, 3:10 to Yuma, American Gangster, Les Miserables, Man of Steel. Even The Loudest Voice.

[u/ubertraquer]

I love these. Ethan Hawke was my favorite, I could listen to him talk about film making for hours.

[u/enigmaticEel]

God damn. Some of these comments are downright nasty. Sure the man put on some weight, but I mean most people do when they get older. The man has boat loads of charisma and talked about some cool moments in some great films can't y'all enjoy that without breaking someone else down.

[u/TwwIX]

Gabe Newell?!

[u/DiscoDingoDoggo]

It is pretty funny when he’s asked “are you a nice guy” and he says “probably not”

He’s apparently pretty awful to work with and had a really volatile temper on set

[u/Onlyfattybrisket]

He looks ready to play the lead in a remake of Grizzly Adams.

[u/soupaman]

Insert unoriginal comment about his looks

[u/Chionger]

Fightin Around the World