Russell Crowe Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

energy on the training ground and you know, I mean, sometimes you're so lucky that Angelo Dundee with all his wisdom and experiences comes into my life as a mentor and you know I only knew him alive for eight years, but what a joyful person He was, what an inspiring person, you know, from time to time he would just say I don't know how I'm going to do this, he just had a way of making you believe that it took an immense amount of discipline to play that character, you know he was so in that world. , so in that place when I made the decision that because I am playing a boxer at a certain point I would have a prosthetic nose and at a certain point I would have prosthetic cauliflower ears also because of the black color and white photographs.

I had seen Jim Braddock. He had these hazel ears, you know, sticking out the side of his head, so we made these pieces that pushed my ears out like this and, wow, he came to me and said. You know

russell

, uh, as a guy who grew up with ears like that, I'm just wondering if we should make that kind of decision. Do we need to be so precise? I kind of saw what their problem was later, when in a way They were trying to market the movie with every image you know, even if it was a romantic image and they were focusing on the love story between my character and Renee's character .

I have the nose, I have the ears of a gladiator. um, after finishing the insider information. and michael had a conversation, i went to meet ridley, he saw me as an absolute, i don't see how he could have seen me as a roman general, but we really got along, he had gigantic ideas and i thought

most

of them were really impossible . um and it certainly wasn't on the page there wasn't any script that could get us excited but what got me excited was the simple idea it's 184 idea or 180 ad you're a Roman general and you're being led by ridley scott you know that really boosted my motivation. , you know, it was very difficult to put on those clothes and say, oh yeah, come on, I'm a Roman general and I know Joaquin Phoenix had the same problem because we talked about it, you know?

The heights that those

characters

had to reach, you know they were and it's very different because at that stage you know that if you're wearing clothes like that, you're probably doing a comedy or pissing, you know, the sword and sandal stuff had been out. fashionable, you know, a long time ago that whole idea was built around the sincerity of the central journey of a man's revenge for the death of his wife and son. My name is maximus desmos meridius commander of the armies of the north general felix. legions loyal servant of the true emperor Marcus Aurelius father of a murdered son husband of a murdered wife and I will have my places in this life or the next it's funny although you see the footage behind the scenes or behind the scenes and everyone is joking and being It's a nonsense and you know the reason you're doing it is because you're saving all the serious stuff for after the guy says action.

You already know

most

people. The complexities of movies are such that you have to have everything organized to the nth degree. Your programming. your team, all these things have to be worked out and particularly with your art department and you know you prepare the dresses and everything so that everyone knows what they are doing, that's the way a film is made, however, we were making a movie that grew as I made the movie and the little things became big ideas and we were being fluid within that gigantic $100 million-plus budget that's all about schedules and disciplines and being exact about things, even up to, you know, this conversation I had with Ridley where I said I wanted to decapitate a guy, you know, and at the end of this fight sequence, he said, well, look, you know, I can't just add a decapitation, It's quite heavy.

I'm going to have to discuss it with the studio and everything and I said look this is how the choreography is going right now and I showed him I said this is what I want to change it to and I showed him and he could see that it was more dynamic and more part of the character and the last move of that sequence was this decapitation, you know, and he's literally smoking a cigar, he said what he had to say, he saw it, you know, a couple of puffs from a cigar and he calls his first assistant direction and He says Terry, how many heads do we have left?

You know, but I always compare working with Ridley to working with a great Renaissance painter, the way he sees the world and the level of art that he makes on the screen. I ended up making five movies with Ridley and every one of those experiences has to be in my top 10 movies I've made. In fact, my first move into Robin Hood when the idea came up was to grab every Robin Hood. book that I was able to have a lot of them and I got on a boat in North Queensland and started reading, so I just wanted to know what the mythology was, everything I could discover, what I came up with and what I brought.

Ridley's thing was that we all have a remodeled view of Robin Hood that comes from the Victorian era, but in fact this legend began many hundreds of years before we began to look at the facts of the currently understood myth and the realities of history. timeline and always in the Robin Hood stories in a modern era, King Richard comes into the story, he's been on a crusade and he comes into the story at the end of the story to save the day, you know, confirms that Robin he is a good man. and the sheriff of nottingham was wrong and blah blah, but what we found out is that apart from a few months earlier in his life, king richard was french, he didn't return to england, he went on the crusades and died in france. was our first hook, okay, everyone else is expecting a Robin Hood where King Richard comes in at the end to save the day.

Our Robin Hood begins with the death of King Richard, who died sieging a castle in France, you know, and of course. I got to work with the magnificent Cate Blanchett or La Blanchett as I call her in that film and I discovered that you know she is not only a wonderful actress, but she is also spectacular company. I am ashamed of you. Hi Marion, I've come to Save You, I remember being on that set in Bourne Wood, the same place where we filmed certain parts of Gladiator and I'm looking up the hill, towards this French castle that the art department built on the top of the hill and I'm looking around, hundreds of archers and we have 180 horses galloping down the beach.

This is probably the last physical production of this scale that I can do. You know, things were changing so quickly and it's been proven that way. Now I'm sure. I've been in big budget movies, but not on that kind of scale where everything is built, you know, look, the idea of ​​this script was a little nauseating when I first read it, I didn't really think I'd want to have anything to do with him, but then you know, someone asked me why aren't you going to do it, you know, and it's like because it's very scary and it scares me that this is something that happens, this individual, this character is acting based on a A lack of humanity is a lack of empathy and he's imploding and he's going to take you with him, ma'am, okay?

I'm pretty sure the guy in that truck is following me, he's on the highway, why don't he relax, man, he's on his way. I know one of the things that was really important to me with this is that at no point were we trying to justify his actions or his thought process because most of us will go through this type of thing and you know, it's just the upside. and the ups and downs and the weaknesses and quirks of life, but this particular man has decided that all of this adds to his right to destroy and terrorize and we have seen that type of personality at play, I mean, 20 years ago, I would have made. in my mind it was written as kind of an anomaly, you know, but that's what kept running through my mind when you know school shootings and shootings and nightclubs, but it's the same thought process and so So much so, it became more important to me and when I drew particularly on my conversations with Derek and his perspective as a filmmaker, I knew that this film is not just about emotions, shocks and violence.

This movie ends up being a direct commentary on the state of American society, Western society today. It went from being the thing that scared me the most to the thing that made me most responsible for having to do it uh gq and those of you who have tuned in um that's the end of that, I've been boring you for quite some time. I've been talking for a while about how some of my

iconic

characters

are

iconic

and are the definition of someone else and I'm just the fool who has to say it, but anyway I hope you got something out of this, have fun and thank you.