Russell Crowe Considered Walking Away From ‘Gladiator’ As He Thought First Script Was “Absolute Rubbish”
Russell Crowe is looking back at his time on Gladiator and revealing that he almost walked away from the Ridley Scott-directed 2000 film as he thought the script was “absolute rubbish.”
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Crowe said that Gladiator was his twentysomething film and going into the project he was confident in his abilities as a leading man.
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“What I wasn’t confident about with Gladiator was the world that was surrounding me,” Crowe said in the interview. “At the core of what we were doing was a great concept, but the script, it was rubbish, absolute rubbish. It had all these sort of strange sequences.”
Crowe continued, “One of them was about chariots and how famous gladiators used certain types of chariots and some famous gladiators had endorsement deals with products for olive oil and things like that, and that’s all true, but it’s just not going to ring right to a modern audience. They’re going to go, ‘What the f*** is all this?’ The energy around what we were doing was very fractured.”
The actor went on to win an Oscar for his role of Maximus Decimus Meridius but said that he considered leaving the film.
“I did think maybe a couple of times, maybe my best option is to just get on a plane and get out of here,” he admitted.
What made Crowe stay in the film was his “continued conversations with Ridley that gave me faith.”
“He said to me at one point in time, ‘Mate, we’re not committing anything to camera that you don’t believe in, 100%.’ So when we actually started that film, we had 21 pages of script that we agreed on,” he explained. “A script is usually between 103 or four or 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.”
Watch the interview in the video below.
With a sequel to Gladiator set to be released in November 2024, Crowe recently said he was “slightly jealous” of not being part of the film.
“I mean, look, the only thing that I really feel about it is slightly jealous, you know? Because I was a much younger man, obviously, and it was a huge experience in my life,” Crowe told Collider in an interview. “It’s something that changed my life, really. It changed the way people regarded me and what I do for a living, and, you know, I’ve been very lucky to be involved in lots of big movies, but the legs on that film are incredible.”
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