Okay, so. GQ: Actually Me. Russell Crowe.
That's my name.
Today I'm going undercover.
It's actually me.
[keyboard tapping]
Let's check X.
Good day Russell Crow.
Back in days when you worked on stage, you did Grease.
What character did you play?
In the theater musical, there's a character called Roger
who keeps showing his ass or mooning.
He sings a song called Mooning Over You.
But that character didn't survive it to the feature film.
The Insider and Gladiator
came out a year from each other.
How did Russell Crowe get so ripped?
In The Insider, I'm not as big as it looks like I am.
I'm actually doing stuff with my body
and the way I chose my clothes
to make the character look older.
This is 1998, The Insider.
Gladiator was 1999.
Basically from the moment that I came off the set
of The Insider,
I started working on, getting ready for Gladiator.
How did Russell Crowe not laugh
when Ryan Gosling did that shriek in The Nice Guys?
[Ryan shrieking]
You mind if I have an apple? I did f*ckin' laugh.
Ryan Gosling is one of the funniest people I've ever met
in my life.
Working with him is kind of torturous.
I'm known for being able to just stay in character
no matter what's going on.
But for whatever reason,
Ryan tickles my fancy
and he can make me laugh at the drop of a hat.
Do people talk enough about
how incredibly talented Russell Crowe is with accents?
Supes impressive.
It's actually one of the things that really bugs me.
Back in the day,
people used to really care about
getting them absolutely right,
but now they just,
it's like people's ears have changed.
They hear so many different voices and stuff now,
they don't really know the difference.
So post-production on a big film when you've done an accent
can be quite problematic,
'cause nobody really wants you to perfect it
like they used to.
I like voices.
What's your favorite conspiracy theory?
Mm.
Well, currently I'm reading a lot of stuff that says,
you know, full contact in 2027
and there's all these people that used to work for NASA,
all these other organizations out there
talking about how our histories as a species
is really simply a series of genetic experiments
to get us to where we are now.
When you look around, there's a lot of proof
that says that that might actually be a thing.
Anyway, that's what I'm thinking about these days.
Quora. I'm not sure what that is.
Do I regret turning down Lord of the Rings?
I don't, actually.
Now, I was a big Tolkien reader when I was a kid,
so I got quite excited about the idea
of Lord of the Rings,
but I very much felt the studio were making that decision,
not the film director.
And I talked to Peter Jackson over the phone
and he wasn't saying the sort of things
that directors would say to you
if they were really trying to attract you to a project.
And I just kind of got a sense
that he already had something else in mind
that he wanted to do
and me stepping forward saying yes
was actually gonna get in his way.
So, you know, 'cause the thing is,
we come from the same place.
So if there's a nuance in that conversation
that other people might not hear.
We're both New Zealanders.
And I knew in his own way,
without him saying anything negative, he had another plan.
So I just left at that.
Why did the FBI follow Russel Crowe
wherever he went for two years?
It was very odd.
There was just like, a kidnap threat.
I arrived in Los Angeles for something
and knock, knock, knock on the hotel room door.
It's the FBI. They wanted to have a chat
because they'd picked up this kidnap threat
and they asked to, you know, if I didn't mind,
they'd like to hang around with me for a while.
It was just, it was odd.
2001, I think that started.
It was very odd for a while.
How did I become a fan of Leeds United?
In the early '70s after I did sport in the mornings,
I'd go back home.
I was playing rugby league or rugby union at the time
and cricket in the summer.
Around about the middle of the day,
I think one channel had a gardening show.
There was only three channels back then.
One channel had a gardening show,
the other channel was showing Swami somebody or other
doing yoga classes.
And the other channel was Match of the Day.
Now remember I'm talking about
growing up in Sydney with this.
Leeds had a pretty good successful team in the early '70s,
so they would come up on Match of the Day quite a lot.
So I chose Leeds and my brother chose Liverpool.
In our entire lives,
we've only ever supported the same team in one area,
and that's the national rugby team of New Zealand,
the All Blacks.
Every other sport, we have different teams.
Why was Ross Crowe initially reluctant
to sign onto to Gladiator?
Because it had an absolute sh*t script.
The script was just terrible.
It made absolutely no sense
and it delved into things like, you know,
and which is a true thing, you know, that, you know,
gladiators in the arena would occasionally
basically take on endorsem*nts for products and stuff
like olive oil and everything.
It's provable, it's a fact,
but it's just not interesting for a film
and it kind of takes people out of the time period
if it's something that seems so modern.
It was my conversations with Ridley,
actor to filmmaker,
that really made me decide to do that film.
You know, I obviously knew it was an incredible director,
but in conversation I also knew I could listen to him
and he could listen to me.
So we could collaborate then, you know.
Am I a method actor?
Here's the thing.
You have to develop your own method of how you do things,
how you understand things
and how you, you know, calculate a character emotionally.
I do a lot of what I just call, simply research,
and I actually enjoy that aspect of the job a lot.
I think it's a privilege
when you have something really interesting and exciting
to learn about.
I've just come off the set of Nuremberg.
I've been playing Hermann Goring,
the head of the Luftwaffe,
and there was a huge amount of stuff
to read about and learn about with his life
prior to that situation.
I'm not the actor that likes people
to call him by the character's name or to me,
I exist as the character between action and cut.
That's it.
But there are other things that you bring into it.
And as I said, you develop it over time.
You develop your own methodology over time.
But I'm not certainly one of those guys that, you know,
that the production has to bend around
to their individual sort of peccadillo
about how they wanna play.
When you've been doing the gig as long as I have,
all that stuff is just a waste of time.
It is acting at the end of the day, you know.
It's just pretending.
Alrighty Instagram, here we go.
How did you get into music again
after years of focusing on acting?
How would you describe your band's sound?
Now, how did I get into music again?
The music doesn't stop.
The journey of trying to live a creative life
begins with me walking out on a stage with a guitar
and singing a song.
My first record came out in 1982.
There's never been a period of time
where I'm not doing music.
Just sometimes I don't, you know, tour as much.
Particularly while my kids were little,
I sort of stopped doing big 30, 40, 50 show tours.
So I come off a film set
and then if I was then gonna go on the road with a band,
there's no time in there to be dad.
And I really wanted to be dad,
but that doesn't mean I wasn't writing songs.
It doesn't mean I wasn't releasing music.
So it's been continuous, it's never gone away.
This latest stuff that I'm doing now, you know,
we've basically, this band,
the Gentleman Barbers is still under the umbrella
with a thing called the Indoor Garden Party,
which is what we call the shows.
We've been working together now for five years.
Last year we toured Australia, we toured to Malta,
we did shows in Italy
and then Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic.
This year we're doing like 15 more shows in Italy.
We're doing Ireland, we're doing the UK,
we're playing in France, we play in America,
and then we finish off the tour,
40 shows or whatever, with a festival in Brazil.
Now this is a great rec.
What other music are you into at the moment
and what would you recommend?
Talking about me recommending here
a guy called Alex Cameron,
who's an Australian singer songwriter.
He's got a particular type of humor, Alex,
it's not everybody's cup of tea.
He certainly makes me laugh a little bit.
But also I just love his melodies
and I love the way his songs work.
Right at the moment, there's a guy in America called Brake.
He's got a song called
Cigarettes and Black Lipstick Stains
that I really dig
and I'm really getting into this guy, Ren.
I mean, yeah, he's got a lot of music out
and it's just, he's just amazing.
His voice is amazing. He's got an incredible rap.
He's a great musician.
He's had a sort of troubled life too,
so it's kind of fascinating.
Back to X.
@russellcrowe, I just watched Land of Bad
and I really loved it.
So much to take away from the film
that is great entertainment,
but deals with such serious issues,
but your line about how to spot a vegan
was delivered perfectly.
Are you interested in more comedic roles?
It's funnily enough, I try to put a little bit of comedy
into pretty much everything I do
because a lot of the time
people don't understand how funny they're being, you know,
they could be doing or saying something quite serious,
but it makes you laugh, you know?
I like doing that little thing with an audience
where I give them something
that they think they've discovered
and they don't realize necessarily
that you intended them to have that discovery.
Surely enough time's gone by
for you to dust off your tricorn
and make another Jack Aubrey film?
No one could do it better and the world deserves another.
There's 20 books for God's sake.
I think most of the time Aubrey wears bicorn, not a tricorn.
Yeah, we talked about it a lot for a little while there
and there was a burn on it,
but now I hear, and I could be completely wrong,
but I hear they're gonna start making a TV series.
But yeah, we should've definitely done more than one movie.
It's a funny thing though.
Master and Commander is sort of,
even though it got 10 or so Academy Award nominations
and it did very well box office globally,
it just didn't hit the certain number in America.
And at that time,
that was a very dominant part of the decision.
We kind of missed the boat, so to speak.
Our shoot was over and done
before they started shooting Pirates of the Caribbean.
But then our post-production was very complicated
and took a long time.
So we came out after Pirates of the Caribbean.
And just the way things work,
once people have seen a big boat movie that's a comedy,
then trying to get them to focus on a big boat period movie
that's a drama.
It wasn't so easy.
And the way the movie was sold,
it was like, you know, Gladiator goes to sea
and that was gonna, you know, miss its audience
because it was a Peter Weir movie.
And we should have been, as I like to say,
playing to the smart kids.
We should have been appealing to the people
that just appreciate Peter Weir as a film director first.
The smart kids set the tone.
They're the ones that decide, you know, what's cool
and everybody else follows along.
So that's why he played with the smart kids.
What's one book that impacted your life
and changed your trajectory?
Hmm.
Yeah, I mean there was definitely a period of time
where I was in my late teens, early twenties,
where just like a lot of people
I was really sort of searching for, you know,
deeper meanings and other levels
and kinda work out in my head
what I wanted to actually really pursue.
Paul Coelho's The Alchemist.
That was a big deal when I read that.
But funnily enough, there was another book too
called The Secret to Money Is Having Some.
And that sounds very trite,
but it was sort of,
it was just a book for clarifying
what your actual pursuit is.
I used it as a prop, actually, in a movie called Proof.
I was playing a dishwasher in a restaurant
and I had it sort of sitting on the shelf above me.
YouTube.
So I love this movie.
He's talking about an Australian movie
called The Water Diviner which I directed,
came out in 2014.
Does anyone know if Russell Crow
has plans to do more directing?
Hold on a second, I'll just ask him.
Probably.
I did another movie called Poker Faced
where I took over a production that was about to fail.
So it wasn't really like, you know,
I mean I rewrote the script and all that sort of stuff,
but that was a very difficult situation,
picking up an entire feature film,
six weeks left in pre-production before shooting.
It was very difficult.
But yeah, more and more though with,
if I'm gonna direct again,
I want it to be stuff that I've written myself.
Wow. I never know he co-owned a rugby league team.
How did this come about, I wonder,
and what have been the highlights?
Yeah, when I was a kid,
I started following a rugby league team
called South Sydney Rabbitohs.
Oldest rugby league team in Australia, formed in 1908.
By the time you get around to the early 2000s,
the team that was a championship team when I was a kid
had become like perennial also-rans and losers.
Sort of was breaking my heart a little bit, you know.
I remembered how much it meant for me
to live in that district
and have a successful football team.
And I could see being able to make them successful again
would have a very profound effect in that area.
Australia is quite focused on sport, you know,
and quite inspired by sport
and I knew if I could put a situation together
where the team could start to become successful again,
then it would do much, much more in the community
than simply create more people focused on sport.
And I took over in 2006,
'cause you know, I started giving the team money,
but nothing was changing.
So at one point in time I said out loud,
in a public situation,
I'm, you know, I'm giving you money, but nothing changes.
Maybe I should just take the place over and run the joint
and blah, blah.
And it ended up that's what happened.
There was a vote for me to take over as the owner.
Since then, we've enjoyed quite a lot of success,
particularly in 2014 when we won the Premiership,
which was for the first time in 43 years.
Right. Craven The Hunter. What's this?
Wonder how it feels for Russell to play an evil father?
Seems to be quite a dark story.
Well, if you know Craven The Hunter, the comic,
then you're gonna know that it really is a dark story.
I think it's better to wait and let you see that
without talking about it too much.
Right. That's it. Signing off.
Thank you very much.
[mellow music]
