Russell Crowe nearly turned down the leading role in Ridley Scott's 2000 epic "Gladiator," saying he had reservations about the early script that he called "absolute rubbish."
Crowe's performance as Maximus Decimus Meridius in the film earned him an Oscar for best actor and propelled him to Hollywood stardom. In an interview with Vanity Fair, he said he was hesitant when he first received 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. At the core of what we were doing was a great concept, but the script, it was rubbish. Absolute rubbish," he said.
Crowe said some of the scenes were confusing.
"It had all these sort of strange sequences, and 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," he said.
"They're going to go, 'What the f--- 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?"
Scott persuaded Crowe to stay and film the project by promising that they would not go ahead with anything that Crowe did not believe in or support.
"He said to me at some point in time, 'We're not committing anything to camera that you don't believe in, 100%," he said. "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."
A sequel is currently in the works starring Denzel Washington, Barry Keoghan, and Paul Mescal, but Crowe has no involvement. Earlier this month he told Collider he is "slightly jealous" about the new film.
"The only thing that I really feel about it is slightly jealous, you know?" Crowe said. "Because I was a much younger man, obviously, and it was a huge experience in my life. It's something that changed my life, really. It changed the way people regarded me and what I do for a living."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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