Hollywood’s Gladiator From the Outback, Russell Crowe fought his way to the top to Tinseltown’s A-list. Now, with the title role in Gladiator, he has a chance to carve that powerful position in stone. By David Giammarco He may not have won the Oscar, but in coming close, 36-year-old Aussie actor has conquered the world. “To me, it was an overwhelming privilege,” Crowe says of the Best Actor nomination he earned for his turn as tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider. “I’m an Academy Award-nominated actor now for the rest of my career, no matter what crap I do.” Thankfully there isn’t too much of that coming down Crowe’s career pipeline. He is suddenly surfing a tidal wave of popularity and being offered A-list projects after years of toiling in Hollywood’s trenches. If L.A. Confidential (1997) first piqued audience interest in Crowe, and The Insider finally made his peers sit up and take notice, then this month’s Gladiator will carve in stone his reign as one of this generations’ greatest actors. Directed by Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise), Gladiator is a sweeping character epic of Cecil B. DeMille proportions that devotes as much attention to the gladiatorial brutality of ancient Rome as it does its assortment of Machiavellian characters. In short, it’s an action film with brains. That’s what intrigued Crowe, who says he’d been inundated with stacks of nonsensical action scripts, each one worse than the last. But he admits that accepting Gladiator was still a giant leap of faith. “They basically said to me, ‘Look Russell, we don’t have a script that you would care about, but we’ve got a concept: Ridley Scott... 185 AD... you start the movie as a Roman General. Do you want to talk to Ridley?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely!’ because that really got into my imagination and I just couldn’t let it go.” When Crowe finally did receive the script, he wasn’t impressed. “They were right, it wasn’t very good,” he says with a laugh, firing up the first of many cigarettes. He’s sitting in a suite at the Century Plaza in L.A., dressed casually in black jeans and a black shirt. “It was too modern, too cynical, had gags about advertising in it. It just didn’t make any sense to go to that place with such a facile set of dialogue and scenes.” Remarkably, all the elements came together, resulting in what is one of the first real Oscar contenders of the year. But it’s a chance Crowe doesn’t want to take again. “It turned out really well, so we were lucky,” he says. “But if it had turned out bad, then that would’ve affected me ever taking a leap of faith again. Because you can have 5,000 blokes charging through the forest on horseback, you can have lions and tigers, and you can have a spectacle as big as you want, but if you don’t have a story that means anything to people, then there is really very little point to making the movie. “The fact it worked out so well is really surprising,” he adds, “because all we had was this concept and a belief in each other’s abilities to pull it off.” That they did. The $110 million film pits Crowe, as beloved Roman General Maximus, against the conniving Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), who decides Maximus must be executed in order to prevent his rightful claim to the throne. But Maximus escapes death, in dramatic fashion, by slaying his executioner, and is then exiled into slavery, where he quietly plots the downfall of the young emperor. Shot on location in Malta and Morocco, director Scott even went so far as to build a full-scale replica of the Roman Colosseum and a gladiator “training area” - complete with ferocious felines. “This was certainly the most physically demanding film I’ve ever done,” says Crowe. “When I made [the hockey film] Mystery, Alaska, I didn’t think I would ever find a movie where I could punish myself any more than that, but I was wrong. I ended up cracking a bone in my foot. I fractured my hip [they had to shoot around him for a few days], both bicep tendons popped out. And I still don’t have any feeling in the top of this finger [he holds up the index finger of his left hand] ‘cause it got slashed in the very first battle sequence with a sword that was covered in dirt.” But the pain was worth it. “When I walked into the Colosseum and there’s 5,000 extras shouting ‘MAX-I-MUS! MAX-I-MUS! MAX-I-MUS!’, and chariots and lions are all around you - it was truly the most thrilling experience of my life. That is theatre on a grand scale. And nothing can compare to that feeling.” Crowe’s passion for acting hasn’t diminished since he started out on an Australian TV show at age six. His parents, who moved from New Zealand to Australia when he was four, catered TV and film sets in between running pubs. “I was constantly on film sets, practically from the time I was born,” he recalls. “Somehow it just seemed like my life. I knew it was going to be my career. “Even at six.” he adds with a laugh, “I would look at the 28-year-old guy playing the war veteran in a film and tell my parents, “I don’t know why the director doesn’t see me in that role. I might be a little short, but I can do it.’” In his teens, Crowe traversed the performing spectrum, from playing in a rock and roll band, to high school theatre, to professional stage musicals like The Rocky Horror Show (“as Frank N. Furter, and I was pretty good in high heels,” he chuckles), Blood Brothers and Grease (“I had to do those f---ing dance routines and sing those songs,” he sniffs. “That’s a long way from the movie business, I’ll tell you that”). At 25 Crowe landed his first leading role in a feature film in George Ogilvie’s The Crossing (1990), for which he was nominated for an Australian Film Critics Award (the Aussie equivalent of the Oscars). By 30, Crowe had 10 films to his credit Down Under, including Proof (1991), The Sum Of Us (1994), and most notably, 1992’s Romper Stomper, where he played a psycho skinhead. And although Sharon Stone brought Crowe to America to play the gunslinger turned preacher in The Quick and The Dead (1995), it wasn’t until Curtis Hanson decided he needed an unknown actor to play the brutish yet vulnerable cop in L.A. Confidential, that North American audiences first got a real taste of Crowe. “The reason I got L.A. Confidential,” he notes, “is because I’d done a lot of work that could be appreciated, but nobody could pin me down in terms of ‘Who the f---ing is that guy?’ Curtis needed that kind of anonymity for the character of Bud White.” Crowe still lives on a 560-acre cattle farm in the Australian Outback, seven hours north of Sydney. He feels it’s that geographical distance from Hollywood that gives him an advantage in his performances. “The difference between myself and Hollywood actors is that I don’t live in Hollywood and have phony life experience,” he explains. “I was born in New Zealand and spent two-thirds of my life in Australia. It’s given me a far different viewpoint. I continue to have a life in between the jobs I do. And I think it’s that real life that I experience between the jobs which informs the acting.” But Crowe’s integrity didn’t always work in his favour in Tinseltown. He recalls meeting for a role in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), “and after stating my case to the casting director and the producer, I left the room and suddenly the producer ran after me down the corridor and said, ‘You know, you got to get smart kid. You can’t come into meetings and be this honest ‘cause no one’s going to care. This isn’t Australia.’ “So then she said to me,” he continues, “’This is my advice - when you go into a meeting here in L.A., go in with an American accent. Talk as an American and never let the director or the producer question that you are not from Idaho or Iowa.’ “So I said, ‘You know Lady, I’m an actor. I take on different characters and different accents. That’s what I do. If I walked into a room and played the game to that level and conned a director into giving me a role, then I wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning and go to work with him, ‘cause I would believe he was too f---ing stupid. So I’m just going to do it the way I do it and when I meet a director who understands what the job of acting is, then I’ll work in America. See ya.’” Crowe admits he is accused of being “arrogant”, but it’s simply a level of confidence that is often misconstrued. “See, I’m a very mediocre guitarist,” he says, “so I can’t sit down and jam with Eric Clapton with any level of competence. But I can jam with any actor who walks the planet and know, with absolute confidence, I will fulfill the needs of my character and be open enough to take in whatever information is given at the time and expand it and keep that damn thing real. It’s as simple as that.” Crowe is currently in Poland wrapping up production on Taylor Hackford’s Proof Of Life with Meg Ryan, and then jumps immediately into his good friend Jodie Foster’s next directorial effort, Flora Plum, where he will play a freakshow beast opposite Claire Danes. He says he’s handling this unrelenting work schedule well, “but I don’t get to spend enough time with the people that I love, or in the place that I love much anymore. I have become the king of Frequent Flier Miles. But I’m an actor, mate, and I’ve done it for a long time, and there’s a certain level of the gypsy in the job. And I guess it’s the change of perspective and the change of geography which actually makes my life interesting. Otherwise, it would just be the same series of cowbums in a cattleyard for me. “In order to complete the fantasy of my life, which is to work at the highest level in the art form that I’ve chosen to work in, then I’ve got to keep getting on airplanes,” he adds. “But look at the people I’m getting to work with. Look at the experiences I’m having. Look at the diversity of characters I’m getting to play. So believe me mate, I don’t have any complaints.