You have to admire how little he cares 😅
Russell Crowe has revealed that he nearly turned down the film that made him famous because he thought the script was “s***”
The 60-year-old actor claimed the original script for Gladiator was poorly researched, with some executive not knowing who emperor Marcus Aurelius was.
“You’re reading it and going, oh, f*** off,” the actor told GQ Magazine in a recent interview.
At GQ Heroes 2024, @russellcrowe shared the untold story of how a terrible script was turned into one of the greatest blockbusters of all time#GQHeroes #GQHerosxBMWhttps://t.co/AzHsarQvHe
— British GQ (@BritishGQ) July 3, 2024
"My agent was like, 'well, come on, convince yourself there’s something positive about it, because (Ridley) wants to meet you’.
The actor praised director Ridley Scott for being “monumental as an artistic brain” and added that the pair have “a great relationship”.
But Crowe did not hold back letting the director know what he thought of the original script, even after his first encounter with him.
"It really wasn’t a script. It was just an idea. But not even a good idea," the actor recaled.
“At a certain point, everybody else left the room, and I said, the script’s s***", he added.
The New Zealand native explained that the director had told him he felt it could be improved due to the 100 million dollars in resources they had been given.
“(But it) was one of my first experiences of the expectation of the studio and having studio people involved in the process of developing what you’re doing. And they were f****** not very smart."
The New Zealander revealed that when executives drew a blank on who Aurelius was, he went to the local bookshop and bought six copies of Meditations and said "f****** read this".
He added: "You might be picking up, I’m rather blunt. And when I’m confronted with stupidity like that, I don’t deal with it very well.”
"You’re f****** telling me you’re going to spend 100 million dollars on a subject you don’t know anything about?" the actor recalled.
Crowe said he would meet with director Ridley Scott after hours to work on the script and added that sometimes the pair would be working until 4 in the morning.
“We really enjoyed each other’s company, and that ideas are bouncing around, we really started to give it some morality, and some fibre, and some strength,”
It seems like Russell Crowe deserved more than one Oscar for that movie!
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