Russell Crowe has had several iconic performances over the course of his decades-long career. However, at the end of the day, the film he will probably be remembered for most is Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator.” This is a film that was nominated for 12 Oscars and won five of them (including Best Picture and Best Actor). It’s a film that is so iconic that, nearly 25 years later, has spawned an upcoming sequel. However, as Russell Crowe recently told Vanity Fair (video below), when he was brought onto the film, it was “rubbish.”
In a new video, where Russell Crowe breaks down some of his most famous roles, the actor opened up about the rough state of “Gladiator,” when he came along to star. He explained that he was confident in his own acting abilities but was very concerned with the status of the script.
“I was confident about my abilities as a leading man. What I wasn’t confident about with ‘Gladiator’ was the world that was surrounding me,” he explained. “At the core of what we were doing was a great concept, but the script, it was rubbish. Absolute rubbish. It had all these sort of strange sequences. One of them was about chariots and famous gladiators [who] use certain types of chariots, and some famous gladiators had endorsement deals with products for olive oil and things like that. And it’s all true, but it’s just not going to ring right to a modern audience. They’re going to go, ‘What the fuck is all this?’ The energy around what we were doing was very fractured. I did think, a couple times, maybe my best option is just to get on a plane and get out of here, you know?”
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Crowe added, “It was my continued conversations with Ridley that gave me faith. He said to me at some point in time, ‘We’re not committing anything to camera that you don’t believe in, 100 percent.’ So, when we actually started that film, we had 21 pages of the script that we agreed on. A script is usually between 103 or 104, 110 pages, something like that, so we had a long way to go, and we basically used up those pages in the first section of the movie. So, by the time we got to our second location, which was Morocco, we were sort of catching up.”
Clearly, by the time “Gladiator” was done filming, Crowe and Scott had crafted something special. As mentioned, the film would go on to be a powerhouse with critics and awards organizations, but it also became a huge box office hit, earning more than $460 million worldwide. The film has such a lasting legacy that a sequel is in production now, once again directed by Scott. However, instead of Crowe starring, the new film features Paul Mescal in the lead role, in a story that takes place many years after the first.
You can watch Crowe’s discussion of his career below: