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"I will win the crowd."
The setting is the Coliseum in Rome in A.D. 180,
and the words are pronounced with frightening intensity by an enslaved
general, Maximus, who is about to enter the arena for his first big battle.
The line comes from a pivotal scene in the new film Gladiator, which
brought in a triumphant $32.7 million in its opening weekend. But the words
could just as easily describe the audience-slaying performance Russell
Crowe delivers as the heroic fighter. A brutally headstrong tough guy himself,
Crowe seems born to play Maximus, and his violent display of star power
should help him build a box-office empire of his own. As Crowe's Maximus
goes on to say at the climatic moment: "I will give them something they've
never seen before."
What many have never seen before is an actor who
so clearly means to win the crowd in his own curious way. Crowe has been
tirelessly promoting the Ridley Scott epic in Rome, New York, Australia
and Los Angeles, while also filming the action thriller Proof Of Life
with Meg Ryan in Ecuador. But at the party after Gladiator's Los
Angeles premiere, he lived up to his reputation for being a wildly talented
handful. For much of the evening at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
& Sciences in Los Angeles, he accepted congratulations on his brilliant
performance from such well-wishers as Salma Hayek, Edward Norton, Juliette
Lewis and director Spike Jonze. Finally, the dark-suited Crowe had a few
moments to discuss what part of Maximus is Russell Crowe and what part
of Crowe is Maximus.
"He's a character," the actor barked in his surprisingly
thick and gruff Australian accent. "He's a character I play. My job is
called acting. So the only part of Maximus that bears any relation
to me is the one that wears a medieval tunic, a skirt."
But doesn't Crowe draw at all on his own experience
. . .
"Listen, are you theorizing this whole thing, or
are you asking me a question? Have you got the whole acting thing down?
The answer to that question is not about using a part of you, it's about
using all of you. Committing to it completely. And that's the way
you try and achieve an emotional connection to the audience. If there's
no emotional connection, there's no point in sitting around in a cinema,
is there?"
One hesitates even to agree. Crowe makes a person
nervous. How about this: What is the most difficult . . .
"That's a bad question," Crowe declared with disgust
before hearing it out. "That's a boring question. It's a real obvious question.
It's just another character, mate," he continued. "It's just a job. 'Getting
into the head' -- that's not difficult. It's what the job is. Now, the
fact that you're working that many hours over that many days over that
many weeks over that many months over that many countries, with that many
fight sequences and that many wild animals to tame, it's all difficult
in those terms. But you do it, because you want to do it. And the mere
fact that you're doing it is a pleasure. So it's not difficult. The most
difficult thing about the character -- as well as the most pleasurable
thing -- is wearing the dress."
According to Gladiator producer Doug Wick,
there was never much question who would be the perfect Maximus, a general
whose family is killed by Commodus, the spiteful son of the Roman emperor,
becomes enslaved and enters the Coliseum's arena as a gladiator to avenge
their deaths. "First, there's the physicality -- you really believe Russell
in the arena as a warrior," says Wick. "He has a kind of intensity, a devoutness,
so you believe he's a man who is motivated through the whole movie by a
love for his family. He's probably the first guy since Richard Burton who's
not only an extraordinary character actor but as the basic raw energy onscreen
of a leading man. I think that he's got a furnace inside, and it gets right
up on screen. We were justin Rome with him, and as we're walking across
the city he's still anonymous. I was very aware that it's the last time
in his life he'll ever walk across any major city and not have throngs
around him."
Gladiator may transform Crowe into the sort
of leading man capable of redefining macho for a new century. As the thinking
man's Rambo in this story of political intrigue and clashing steel, he
wears battle scars and blood on his face and 70 pounds of not-unflattering
armor on his powerful 5 foot 11 inch frame. In last year's The Insider,
the story of 60 Minutes's refusal to air an expose on the tobacco
industry, he lumbered wimpily across the screen swathed in 35 pounds that
he gained -- in six weeks -- to play the fiftysomething whistle-blower
Jeffrey Wigand. Crowe, now 36, got an Academy Award nomination for that
role, and showed the world he couldn't care less about looking sexy. That
earned him the respect of his fellow actors -- and, of course, made him
seem a lot sexier. Way back in 1995, Sharon Stone called him "the sexiest
guy working in movies today" when Crowe was appearing in mainly Australian
films. Now, "the future is unlimited for Russell," says Curtis Hanson,
who directed the actor in 1997's acclaimed L.A. Confidential.
It takes a powerful man to inspire silly
stories. In Sydney, Australia, where Crowe's family moved when he was 4,
there is an urban myth that the actor shouts his own first -- and
last -- name at the climatic moment of sex. Meanwhile, in Hollywood, there
are whispered, unconfirmed reports that Crowe ran around with his fellow
Aussie Nicole Kidman before she met Tom Cruise -- and that at this year's
Oscars, Crowe, who owed his presence at the Shrine Auditorium to his role
as an enemy of Big Tobacco, insisted on an aisle seat so he could easily
get up and smoke. What can be confirmed is that he does smoke constantly,
and if that sounds like a contradiction for The Insider himself,
Crowe thinks so, too. "So what? I can handle irony," he has said.
Crowe grew up in the film business but not among
actors. He was born in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, but was
raised, along with his older brother Terry, in Sydney, where his father,
Alex, a pub manager, and mother, Jocelyn, a daughter of a cinematographer,
did some location catering for Australian film and television. "I think
it was genetic -- two generations working in the film industry," Crowe
told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1997. "I'm just the first one
stupid enough to stand in front of the camera." At 6, he scored his first
speaking part, on the Australian TV series Spyforce, despite being
painfully shy. "I was the sort of kid who would sign up for a talent quest,
and then, having done all the rehearsal and all the work, not turn up,"
Crowe once said.
At 14, Crowe began playing in rock bands (one called
Roman Antix) and doing musical theater. For two years, he starred as Dr.
Frank N. Furter in a down-under touring production of The Rocky Horror
Picture Show, and by all accounts he was a pretty sweet transvestite.
Since 1984, under the name Rus Le Roq, he has done double duty as frontman
for the Aussie band 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts, whose most revealing song title
is "I Want To Be Marlon Brando."
Opinion on Crowe's musical talents is split -- one
Aussie rock scribe dismisses his group as "a testosterone outlet." Director
Jay Roach -- who is married to former Bangle Susanna Hoffs -- disagrees.
"I saw him in L.A. at the Mint, and he was great," says Roach. "He's just
as intense a rock & roller as he is as an actor." Crowe compared his
relative abilities in the two fields in the Los Angeles Daily News
this year: "I can't sit down and jam on a guitar with Eric Clapton with
any level of confidence. But I can jam with any actor who walks this planet
and know, with absolute confidence, that I will fulfill the needs of my
character."
Apart from Maximus, Crowe's most career-boosting
role so far was probably the neo-nazi skinhead in the 1993 Australian film
Romper Stomper. Director Geoffrey Wright cast Crowe after seeing
him play a dishwasher in the independent Aussie film Proof. "I didn't
know anything about Russell at the time," Wright told the New York Times
in 1993, "but I thought he was the most menacing dishwasher I'd ever seen."
Crowe's Romper Stomper performance so impressed
Sharon Stone she reportedly held up shooting of the 1995 feminist Western
The Quick And The Dead, for which she was a producer, so he could
appear in the film. Stone told the New York Times that when she
first saw him, "I thought Russell was not only charismatic, attractive
and talented but also fearless. And I find fearlessness attractive."
Some of Crowe's peers, though, have less complimentary
things to say. "There's a fire in him," his Mystery, Alaska costar
Burt Reynolds told GQ last year, "that burns all night long, all
day long, all the time. And that may hurt him." Craig Lahiff, who directed
Crowe's 1997 film Heaven's Burning recently told Talk
magazine: "To put it tactfully, he gave me more than I asked for. He has
strong ideas. He uses a lot of negative energy, and to give a good performance
he makes the other actors suffer."
Crowe doesn't care, deeply. "People accuse me of
being arrogant all the time," he told the Los Angeles Times last
October. "I'm not arrogant. I'm focused." More recently, Crowe told the
Virginian-Pilot, "I have ideas. If that's arrogant, so be it --
I'm there to turn in a performance, not to coddle the director."
Coddled or not, some directors see Crowe's dogged
dedication in a far more positive light. "People who are focused and intense
and committed by definition are difficult," says Hanson. "That comes with
the territory. I would much rather have that kind of difficulty than somebody
who's easy to get along with but falls short on the screen." On the set
of the $110 million Gladiator, Crowe proved he's not afraid of working
hard and taking risks. Though the movie relies on computers to fill out
the Coliseum's crowd shots and battle scenes, much of the shoot -- which
took place in the English countryside, on the island of Malta and in Morocco
-- was down and dirty. "Russell did a great deal of stunts himself," says
Gladiator's production designer, Arthur Max, who observed Crowe
working in England, shooting some of the film's many gritty battle scenes.
"And Russell was in the thick of it. He's not the kind of actor who needs
the trailer on the set." Indeed, Crowe cracked a bone at the top of his
foot, busted a hip and popped the biceps tendon in each arm.
"He's a man's man," says Djimon Hounsou (Amistad),
who costars as Crowe's fellow gladiator-slave Juba. "He likes hanging
out with the guys and having fun." Were he really going into battle, Hounsou
says, he would definitely choose to have Crowe on his side because of the
passion the actor brings to everything he does: "He does it with his heart,
full on, all the way."
Crowe thinks that his personality may be a result
of his roots. In 1997 he told the British magazine Empire that "New
Zealanders tend to be very persistent, you know? And Australians are quite
happy-go-lucky, so I've got kind of a combination of the two things." He
is certainly proud to be a down-under kind of guy. Crowe has a nearly 600-acre
cattle ranch seven hours northwest of Sydney; when his parents and brother
come to visit, he lets them stay in the main house and he moves into a
trailer. He has horses, dogs, turtles, chickens and reportedly even a platypus.
He's called himself an unsuccessful farmer, however, because of his discomfort
with slaughtering the cattle.
That quality may explain the impact Crowe seems
to have on men and women alike: He's tough enough to raise cattle, sensitive
enough to want to spare them. "Russell, as big and macho as his gladiator
is, at the same time has a vulnerability," says Tomas Arana, who plays
Roman senator Quintus in the film and also appeared with Crowe in L.A.
Confidential. "My wife, all the friends of my wife, they say, 'Russell,
God, is he available?'"
He is, extremely, but settling down with one woman
does not seem to be among his priorities. Apart from that possible fling
with Kidman, he has dated actress Danielle Spencer, with whom he appeared
in 1990's The Crossing. He has said he finds women with children
sexy -- and apparently he finds women with other men sexy, too; in any
case, he brazenly hit on Winona Ryder when she was still Matt Damon's girlfriend,
at a pre-Oscar party held at ICM honcho Ed Limato's house in Los Angeles.
Crowe is a player, now, in several senses, one of
them being that he simply likes to cavort. Director Roach insists that
Crowe is quite funny: "he's got a very wry, Aussie sense of humor." Sometimes
Crowe shows his wit with the roles he chooses: After he finishes Proof
Of Life with Meg Ryan, he is signed to play a hairy sideshow performer
opposite Claire Danes in Jodie Foster's next directorial effort, Flora
Plum. As a career move, for a guy who could be commanding Tom Cruise
money soon if he just plays it conservatively and sticks to action-hero
roles, that's so wrong it's absolutely hilarious.
"He's a really complex guy, and I think that's what
makes him such a great actor," says Roach. "It's always a struggle for
what aspect of himself is going to be emerging at any particular time.
You never quite know what it's going to be, but he's never boring." Indeed,
Arana recalls that during one of the many technical breaks in the filming
of Gladiator, Crowe led a mix of cast members and crew in an impromptu
game of American football right in the faux Coliseum, to the entertainment
of the extras. "Russell would make a good catch," says Arana, "and there'd
be big cheers."
Those cheers are likely to continue for decades.
"I will win the crowe," says Crowe as Maximus. And truly he has.
David Wild (additional reporting by Vanessa hTorres)
US Weekly
#275, May 22, 2000
