Russell Crowe looking back on my time the Gladiator and revealed that he almost walked away from the Ridley Scott-directed film because he thought the script was “absolutely rubbish”.
in an interview with Vanity Faircrow said the Gladiator It was his twenty-twenty film and going into the project he was confident in his abilities as a leading man.
“What I wasn’t sure about the Gladiator That was the world that surrounded me,” Crowe said in the interview. “At the core of what we were doing was a great concept, but the script, it was crap, absolute crap. It had all these weird sequences in it.
Crowe continued, “One of them was about chariots and how famous gladiators used certain types of chariots and some famous gladiators endorsed products for olive oil and things like that, and all of that. True, but it doesn’t ring true to a modern audience. They’re going, ‘What the hell is all this?’ The energy around what we were doing was very fragmented.
The actor won an Oscar for his role of Maximus Decimus Meridius but said he considered leaving the film.
“I thought maybe a couple of times, maybe my best option is to just get on a plane and get out of here,” he admitted.
It was his “ongoing talks with Ridley that convinced me” to keep Crowe in the film.
“He told me at one point, ‘Dude, there’s nothing we’re doing in front of the camera that you wouldn’t believe, 100%.’ So when we actually started that movie, we had 21 pages of script that we agreed upon.” A script is usually between 103 or four or 110 pages, something like that. So we just had a long way to go, and we basically used those pages in the first half of the movie. So by the time we got to our second destination, which was Morocco, we were kind of catching up.
Watch the interview in the video below.
with the sequel the Gladiator Slated to be released in November 2024, Crowe recently said he was “a little jealous” of not being a part of the film.
“I mean, look, the only thing I really feel about it is a little bit of jealousy, you know? Because obviously I was very young and it was a huge experience in my life. ‘ collider in an interview. “It’s something that really changed my life. It changed the way people think about me and what I do for a living, and you know, I’m very fortunate that I get to act in a lot of big films. But the legs of that film are incredible.