MAN ON FIRE

Russell Crowe burns with a Brando-like intensity and sexuality. He's a man's man ... which makes it so difficult for him to apologize

Article by Trish Deitch Rohrer
Photographs by Michael O'Neill
GQ March 1999

I CANNOT FIND HIM, RUSSELL CROWE, IN THE BEND OF THE BACK road in the Australian bush where he said to meet him. It is already thirty minutes past the appointed hour, and I have not slept for three days. I am on the wrong side of the road, on the wrong continent, way past hallucinations. I am driving back and forth -- past green hills and a rickety sign advertising pecans -- hoping he will find me.

And then I see it: the blue truck he mentioned, coming over the ridge from the opposite direction. I catch a glimpse of his face as he passes me by, a high-crowned, short-brimmed cowboy hat pulled theatrically low over his brow, eyes the color of the sky; I am sure he is laughing at me.

I had to expect it, that Russell Crowe was not going to be particularly ordinary or easy. It was his imagination, after all, that fueled the maniacal, adrenalized skinhead in Geoffrey Wright's "Romper Stomper." They were his choices that made up the lovesick and uncontrollably violent cop in "L.A. Confidential." It was the awfulness of his glee that jacked up the computer-generated serial killer in "Virtuosity."

I do a U-turn then bump over the grass on the side of the road when his truck appears again from the other direction, and he does his own U-y deep into the grass behind me. He comes to a halt and then doesn't stir from his truck. So I get out. Suddenly he says, irritably, "Move your car up!" I scurry back to my car, confused, and do as he says. And just as I am about to get out again to meet him, he screams away.

I am still thinking, at the moment of his leaving, that I am in Australia to interview Russell Crowe about his new film, "Mystery Alaska." I am still holding on to the idea that a couple of meals over a tape recorder and a quick peek at his farm will do it, and then I can spend the rest of my stay sleeping off my jet lag by the hotel pool. I do not yet see that Crowe has another plan. I pull back onto the road and try to follow my subject into deepest Australia.

DEAN COCHRAN, CROWE'S CHILDHOOD FRIEND -- AND A LONGTIME MEMBER of his small rock band, Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts -- says Crowe thrives on conflict. "Russell knows how powerful negative energy is, and he needs to get it out before it's important. It's almost as if he's engineering a negative situation to prepare for a positive one."

I CAN'T KEEP UP. I AM TOO TIRED TO DRIVE INSIDE THE lines at high speed, and so I slow down. At that moment, Crowe pulls over. I park my car behind his, and we sit there. No one -- neither he nor I -- attempts to leave his or her vehicle.

Finally, Crowe tips out of the truck, walks up to my passenger window and leans in, his forearms on the door like a cop's. "You were supposed to meet me," he says. His voice is deep and sonorous, like a cello. "I knew it was you," he continues, "because you were the only one looking terrified." Then he does an imitation of me looking like a moronic cartoon driver on some very bad speed. It is an unattractive imitation -- cruel, really -- but he thinks it's funny.

I am aching inside, from all the travel and time changes, from missing home, and he finally reaches into my car, a small, funky-looking piece of fruit in his fist. "Here," he says. "Have an apple." He stands up straight then and says, "Lock your car up. I'll drive," and he walks away.

"THERE'S A FIRE IN HIM," BURT REYNOLDS SAYS. REYNOLDS worked with Crowe on "Mystery, Alaska," a film about a small town whose center is threatened when the New York Rangers are brought in to play an exhibition game against the local team -- a sweet group of hockey worshipers with Crowe as their captain. "There's a fire in him," Reynolds says again, "that burns all night long, all day long, all the time. And that may hurt him. Because people don't understand that kind of flame."

"DON'T GO PRANCING AROUND DOWN here alone," Crowe warns me as we bounce along in his flatbed truck over his back pasture, which is green and rife with deep furrows. There is a pair of men's underwear stained with something inorganic on the floor of the cab and a large white spider crushed between the speedometer and the plastic that covers it. Crowe explains why I shouldn't go prancing around his hundred-acre farm alone: Two snakes live on the property, he says, which, when they bite, kill you instantly. And then there are the goannas, gigantic lizards that live in the trees, that climb you -- up one side and down the other -- and the gashes that come from their claws never, ever heal.

Crowe pulls into the middle of a large green field and turns off the engine. He jumps out of the truck and says, "Come on." As he climbs onto the flatbed, I trip out of the truck, catching a glimpse of the field to my right: There are cows running toward me, mooing. I throw myself onto the flatbed next to Crowe.

From all directions, cows are running and mooing. There are big ones, baby ones, spotted ones. Some are brown; others are taupe, black, white. Their noses are as big as oranges. Something about the way they are running makes the trees and the hills all around seem to shrink, and keep shrinking, and the effect is trippy and delightful. There are fifty or sixty cows coming toward us, and they all seem thrilled to see Crowe. I laugh out loud. Then I look over at Crowe and see that he is watching me, a little boy's smile on his face.

THOUGH HE AND HIS OLDER BROTHER, TERRY, WERE born in Wellington, New Zealand, they moved to Sydney when Russell was 4 years old. His father managed pubs, and the family lived in rooms above them for most of the boys' childhood. When Crowe was 14, long after he had started smoking and drinking, his parents moved back to New Zealand, to the more conservative Auckland, where his father got a job managing a place called the Potter's Wheel, commonly known as the Flying Jug. The Flying Jug was on the border of three towns with differences, and when a fight started there, it always ended with the arrival of an ambulance. Someone was murdered in the front room of the Flying Jug one night, and when Crowe tells this story, you see the dead man lying at his feet.

When his mother and father ran into financial trouble four years ago, Crowe bought this nonworking farm and moved them and Terry in. The family sleeps in the house -- a carpeted, small-roomed, one-story affair -- and Crowe sleeps in a caravan (Australian for "trailer") nearby. Because Crowe doesn't have much space, his caravan is packed with boxes of wine and CDs. Whenever we enter, he has to clear a place on a bench for me to sit. He is in the process of doing renovations that will make the farm more comfortable, especially for his parents, whom he sent on a world tour until the bulk of the work was done.

The farm is an idyllic piece of land, at the center of which is a deep, beautiful pasture like a big green bowl. At the bottom of the bowl are three small ponds; over the bowl, like a high-domed lid, hangs Australia's huge blue sky. Under no circumstances -- for space or convenience or profit -- may a tree on this farm be cut down or a cow killed.

AMONG THE MALES ON CROWE'S FARM, THERE IS A PACK-like hierarchy, and Crowe is the alpha wolf. His voice is the lowest -- you can hear its vibration from half a mile away. He sits at the head of the table at every meal, and though he is a master at joking and teasing the other men over lunch and dinner, he is never teased. He is not eating meat or drinking at the moment -- he is recovering from his last film and training for the next -- and therefore no one else is eating meat or drinking. Crowe's authority comes partly from his size (he is one-sixteenth Maori, a physically powerful people who, he claims, were once cannibals), but mostly it comes from a kind of unwavering, old-fashioned masculinity. Crowe does not bumble. Instead, he exudes a palpable power -- you can almost hear his blood pumping through his veins, his heart beating in his chest -- and it amps up into the red when he's anxious. People tiptoe around him when he's working on the farm. At stressful times, he becomes snappish and controlling, and you can feel the electrons in the room speeding up, adding an atmospheric edginess.

One night while we are sitting in his caravan, tired and hungry, he asks if I'd like a synopsis of his next film, "Gladiator," directed by Ridley Scott. I say, "Sure," and sit back, waiting. He says, " 'Sure' -- that means you don't really give a shit." I imagine that some people might grow to resent Crowe for moments like this. Or they might see such a confrontation as interesting, an opportunity for a little intimate interaction in the present moment.

"I CAN'T BE DISPASSIONATELY removed from the things I do," says Crowe, sitting outside the house watching the dogs, Lucy and Chasen, knock each other over. "I really feel sorry for people who are, who divide their whole life up into 'things that I like' and 'things that I must do.' You're only here for a short time, mate -- learn to like it."

On paper Crowe sounds maniacal, but he's really not. People who don't want to sleepwalk through their lives, who want to live to the max in every moment, find it extremely fun to be around Crowe. He's constantly nudging you, saying, "Look at that tree; see how it grows?" "Do you smell that? It's chicken shit." He's always teaching you something -- how to kill a tick, how to deal with a feral cow, the rules of Rugby, the names of trees.

BEING A FEMALE GUEST ON THE FARM IS VERY MUCH like becoming Snow White: All the men who sit at the table -- Bob Long (Crowe's assistant), Rick O'Bryan (Crowe's personal trainer), Dave Chambers (Crowe's cook), Terry (Crowe's brother) and two young farmhands, Paulie and Chris -- fall over themselves with deference. On my first day there, they bustle around like old ladies, ironing linen tablecloths and setting up candelabras for dinner.

With Crowe it's different. To him I am not Snow White. Instead, I am the only guest at what has turned out to be a three-day retreat with Crowe as executive director, subject and spirit guide. Whether we're climbing through barbed wire to get to the woods or visiting busy work sites, Crowe makes sure I am safe and comfortable. It is an astonishing feeling, being under the protection of this man.

One night during dinner, the television is tuned to a Rugby game without sound, and the Australian version of the Laker Girls comes on: There are huge, half-naked men -- Maori, I think -- doing a pregame kind of war dance, which consists of a lot of squatting and stamping. Terry turns to me during this spectacle and says good-naturedly, "Don't try this, Trish."

Crowe, to my surprise, verbally leaps at him across the table. "What did you say?" he says. Terry says, "I told Trish not to try this." Crowe doesn't wait a second; he is in forward motion against even an inkling of impropriety. "What. Did. You. Say?" he says again. Terry turns back to the television and lifts his fingers off the back of the chair. "Got it," his fingers say.

SALMA HAYEK, WHO STARRED WITH CROWE in 1997's "Breaking Up," has a nickname for him -- Bubo. And he has one for her -- Buba. Hayek laughs when she talks about the difficulties of that particular shoot. The days were long, she says, and the amenities few. For example, Hayek arrived on the set one day and found, in place of a dressing room, a blanket on the floor.

"I looked at Russell, and I just went, 'Bubo?' And he says, 'Yes?' And I go, 'Did you throw a fit already?' And he says, 'Yes.' And I go, 'OK -- then I won't say anything.' Because I knew he must have killed them."

CROWE IS TRAVERSING THE LIVING ROOM WHEN NO one else is home. He is telling me about his last girlfriend, an American with whom he broke up last year: She used to travel with him from set to set, but then stopped.

"She couldn't keep getting back on the horse," he says. "And that breaks the absolute communication. And then the 'Where were you last night?' starts to happen." He sits down and begins dunking tea bags in dime-store cups with hearts around the sides. He laughs, but it is really only one short exhale from the back of his throat. "The tyranny of distance," he says. He hands me my cup.

Crowe makes a connection between his ex-girlfriend and his work. "It takes a certain strength of character to realize," he continues, "that the ground shifts under you all the time. You've got to know how to adapt and focus, mate. And to do that in front of the camera, too. When fucking things come up, you can't stop and say" -- here he does a typical (for him) imitation of a spoiled American director, high-pitched and fey -- Adrienne! I can't do this anymore!"

CROWE STARTED ACTING AS AN EXTRA WHEN HE WAS 6 years old, on a television show for which his mother was the caterer. He began doing musical theater at 19 and continued through his early twenties -- "Grease," "The Rocky Horror Show," "Blood Brothers." (He also busked on the street and worked as a waiter, a car detailer, a DJ, an insurance salesman, a telephone solicitor, a fruit picker, a horse wrangler and a bingo caller on a resort island.) But Crowe had had one of his front teeth knocked out in a Rugby game when he was 10, and he lived with that gap until he was 25, when George Ogilvie, who directed Crowe in his first leading role, in "The Crossing," said to have it fixed. At that point, Crowe's career hit the nitro: In the last ten years, he has made twenty-one films, including the Australian gems "Romper Stomper," "Proof" and "The Sum of Us." Though Sharon Stone brought Crowe to America to play the gunslinger turned preacher in "The Quick and the Dead," it wasn't until Curtis Hanson needed an unknown actor for "L.A. Confidential" -- someone audiences wouldn't automatically assume was a good guy or a bad guy -- that the insinuation of Russell Crowe into the began. Now, with the one-two punch of "Mystery, Alaska" and Michael Mann's upcoming untitled tobacco project, Crowe will surely begin a long run of worldwide knockouts.

IN ORDER TO PLAY 53-YEAR-OLD, BRONX-REARED tobacco-industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand in the Mann film (also starring Al Pacino), Crowe, who's 34, gained thirty-five pounds. He did this in six weeks by eating cheeseburgers and drinking bourbon. He also shaved his head to better fit a gray wig, and he changed his walk.

Michael Mann thinks Crowe is "a young Marlon Brando." "Let me put it this way," Mann says. "He walked the way Wigand should walk, even if Wigand didn't walk that way OK? Russell makes you work harder because, wow, I've got a 425-horsepower Ferrari here, and I could really go, 'Let's go, man!' "

If Crowe has trouble on movie sets, it's more often than not because he doesn't easily trust directors. But he admired Mann, even though he saw him as megalomaniacal. What he can't stand is being smarter, stronger and more talented than his overseer. "The person who's in charge of the ship," he says one day in his caravan about a typical director with no vision, "wants to put up the sails when there's no wind and call for the spinnaker in a coral reef." He lights a cigarette and shoves the pack back into his shirt pocket. "The fuck is that shit?" he says. "There's a lot of pressure put on your performance by indecision -- somebody doesn't know what the fuck they want. If you don't know what you want, then how can I perfect that for you?

"It's not like doing a thing," he says about performing. "It's doing the thing: the right thing, the right decision, the collection of physical movements or intellectual ideas which actually will communicate this across that vast gulf of seats. There's got to be that intellectual capacity on the part of the captain of the ship, not" -- here he does that fey American thing again -- "Julian! I need some more coffee! You people don't respect me!" He doesn't laugh, but I do. "I had that a lot on this one particular movie," he says.

"Which one?" I ask.

"It's called--" and then he rubs his index finger up and down on his lips, making a bububububu sound.

CURTIS HANSON, WHO DIRECTED "L.A. CONFIDENTIAL," says, "Russell was relentless in his pursuit of the essence of the character. If that made him a pain in the ass sometimes, you live with it. What I don't like living with is someone who's a pain in the ass out of either star stuff or just self-involvement. With Russell it was about the work."

IT IS 7:30 IN THE MORNING, MY second day on the farm, and I ask if I can help drench the cows (that is, get them into a corral, coax them down a narrow chute and then spray them with a poison that kills ticks). Crowe, hard at work in his shorts and hat, gives me the job of getting the cows into the chute. This means climbing into the corral with them and doing whatever it takes -- pushing them, pulling their tails -- to force them down the metal corridor that leads to the drenching.

It is thrilling to be so close to such big, amusing animals, and I don't even mind when one shits all over my new clogs. When Lucy begins playing with the cows, barking wildly and snapping at their hooves, Crowe points at her and yells, "Mate!" and Lucy sits down, guilty and cowering. Everyone laughs.

Then two of the black cows escape the assembly line. Crowe tells me to climb some fences and get up behind them, and I hesitate. He says it again: Climb those fences, and gestures vaguely. So I do that -- I head for the fences nearest me and start to climb, not realizing that what he wants is for me to sneak around the cows and surprise them.

"Not those fucking fences!" he yells, his hands in fists, his eyes flashing. "Where the fuck do you think the cows are going to go?!"

I come down off the fence, shocked. The morning is suddenly frozen, the farmhands silent and staring at their boots. No one has ever yelled at me like that. After a moment or two, the day starts up again. Eventually, the cows are caught and drenched, and Crowe and I walk up to the house in silence.

A few minutes later, when we are all sitting down to a post-drenching cup of tea, he pushes his cigarettes and his plastic lighter toward me across the table, keeping his hand on the pack. He is looking me in the eyes, and he says, "Coffin nail with your cuppa, love?"

It works as an apology. Still, I speak to him that afternoon about yelling at me, and he acts as if he doesn't remember. "What did I say?" he asks me. Then he says, "Well, where did you think the cows would go if you came up behind them like that?" I say I don't know -- I don't know much about cows at all. He doesn't tell me that I could have killed him, sending the cows stampeding in his direction. Instead, he takes a moment, and then he says, "I'm sorry." After a while, he says, "It's not easy keeping up with the apologies."

Later a man comes by to see about leveling part of the pasture in back of the house: A lot of kids are coming for the holidays, and Crowe wants them to have a proper field to play soccer on. Because the two front seats of the truck are taken, Crowe puts me onto the flatbed, tells me to stand up and shows me where there's a bar to hold on to.

"It's like surfing," he says. Then he gets into the truck and proceeds to drive fast up and down the hills leading to the pasture, making sharp turns and bumping over the ruts. Chasen is running out in front, barking, and Lucy is trying to keep up behind. It is like flying. It is like being a kid again. Crowe smiles at me conspiratorially when, a few minutes later, I jump off the truck, flushed and laughing.

ACCORDING TO DIRECTOR JAY Roach, Disney wanted "Mystery, Alaska" -- written by David E. Kelley and Sean O'Byrne -- to be a "Russell Crowe movie." But Crowe, who had signed on to an ensemble film, had no intention of hogging the limelight. What he did want to do, though, was create an onscreen closeness among the members of the "Mystery" hockey team by creating it offscreen among the actors.

"We'd go out, and we'd have a rip-roaring, howdy-doody little bit of a party," Crowe says, "and we'd be on the ice the first thing in the morning."

I am sitting at the table on the day no one is around, and Crowe is in the kitchen, boiling more water. Outside, the chickens are running around the dusty drive like fat and colorful flowers. Crowe tells me how he made the teammates sing their respective national anthems on the ice. "It's all about creating such an exciting learning environment that everybody stays on their toes," he says. "And things come out of the performance which you can't go down to the shop and buy."

He is pacing around by now, excited. "You've got to take an audience by surprise," he says. "You've got a lot of work to do to keep people with you. So take the extra mile."

He stops, suddenly, and looks at me.

"I don't know, mate," he says. "I'm starting to talk about it now like it's fucking Shakespeare or some fucking hugely impressive piece of art, and it really isn't -- it's just a warm little movie. But you can't make warm little movies without a certain emotional involvement or they don't come out warm, you know?"

I am sitting there with my hot water and my tea bag. I am listening to him, and I am dunking. He starts to watch me, and I become self-conscious: He is a stickler for how tea is made. I lay the bag in my spoon and start to wrap the thin string around it. "Take the tag all the way around," he says, and he sits down next to me, intent on what I'm doing. I press the tag onto the steaming tea bag, and he says, "You put it on top, so then you don't burn your finger when you squeeze." I squeeze the tea bag, my thumb on the tag, my index finger on the back of the spoon. "Squeeze," he says. "Squeeze." I finish, unwrap the bag from the spoon, set it aside and look at Crowe. "There you go," he says. "Right?"

What Crowe wants is total, fearless, impulsive involvement. When I ask how often he gets a chance to really mix it up in a scene with another actor, he goes into a kind of Pentecostal routine. "If you give over absolutely in that moment," he says, "we're going to have a ball, man. And it's going to be real, and it's going to be true, and we're going to look at each other, and that fella says, 'Action,' and we're going to have a little connection -- a little extra connection -- that's just between me and you."

I know what that extra connection is. It's the moment between Crowe and his hoof-biting dog, Lucy, when he yells, "Mate!" It's the moment he passes the cigarette pack across the table -- and does not take his hand away. It's the moment he says, "What. Did. You. Say?" It's the moment the cows come running, and the tea is done well, and, even though you've got a lot of apologizing to do, you say, "I'm sorry."

A FEW NIGHTS AFTER I GET home, Crowe calls. He tells me that Lucy has been sleeping with him in the caravan for the last three nights. There was a storm, he says, and the lightning came so close to the farm and stayed lit for so long that he could count to five Mississippi before it went dark again.

In the silences, I think I can hear his big heart beating from around the world.

"We forgot to look at the stars," I say.

"The nights were overcast," he says. "Had they been clear, we would have been out there, pointing up."

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