January 14

Source: Variety | Oscar Watch Section

January 14, 2001

Russell Crowe | 'Gladiator'
By Nick Madigan

Russell Crowe cuts a swath, so to speak, in "Gladiator" in a role that calls for someone who looks at ease settling scores the old-fashioned way.

DreamWorks' sword-and-sandals pic, which reportedly cost about $103 million to make, required Crowe to play a heroic Spanish general in the service of Rome who falls from grace and loses his family and freedom in the process. Thrown into slavery, Maximus takes his revenge in the gladiator arena.

Choosing Crowe, who was becoming well known for his Oscar nominated performance in 1999's "The Insider" but was not yet a major star, was a calculated move, according to producer Douglas Wick.

"You really want to believe that Maximus is a real person and not a movie star in a toga," says Wick, who also cites Crowe's "extraordinary screen presence."

"Russell has real authority, an inner engine that makes him pop off the screen," Wick continues. "When you think of the movie stars that last, they have some kind of a furnace inside, an inner dynamic. Russell brought that to the character."

Crowe's own sense of perfectionism was the crowning touch to his work as the brutally efficient Maximus, Wick says. "His standards are extraordinary. If Russell doesn't feel that a part of the character's journey is credible or well thought out, he'll say so, and if no one listens he'll get on a table and shout until someone does.

"There's no quarter-inch of any performance that Russell is involved in that he won't fight to the death for."

Which makes his casting in the film all the more appropriate.



Russell Crowe: Defending champ in another hit pic
By Steven Oxman

OSCAR QUOTIENT

PROS: Great range: from a Roman fighter to a world-renown intellect

CONS: Nom seems a sure bet, but can he pull a Tom Hanks and win two years in a row?

Director Ron Howard hadn't seen Russell Crowe's Oscar-winning turn as the title character in "Gladiator" before deciding he should play mathematician extraordinaire John Forbes Nash in the biopic "A Beautiful Mind."

But he had been dazzled by Crowe's performance as the stressed-out tobacco biz whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand in "The Insider," another Oscar-nominated performance from the Aussie leading man who's proved himself equally adept at playing warrior and thinker alike.

"I had a great deal of confidence in Russell's chameleon-like ability to transform himself and invent a very original character," says Howard. "However, it wasn't really until I met Russell and was talking to him about this character that I was 100% convinced, because Nash's intelligence has to be evident, and Russell naturally displayed an ambitious, even aggressive intellect.

"It's also a role that demands a unique combination of physicality, charisma, intelligence and the possibility of this eccentricity."

Whereas Crowe had worked extensively with Wigand to craft his portrayal in "Insider," Howard discouraged Crowe from working directly with Nash, and the two didn't meet until after shooting began.

"I didn't want Russell to do an imitation of Nash. Besides, most of the film takes place when Nash is a young man. Nothing ever had been recorded and saved, and no television appearances had been kinescoped. So there wasn't a lot to go on. It really was more an act of interpretation and invention.

"The thing that was most exciting for me with Russell," adds Howard, "was (how he captured) the gradations of Nash's psychological and emotional states."

Crowe and Howard did spend time examining documentary footage of schizophrenics, research that helped to define the physicality of the role.

"I think Russell does an interesting thing," says Howard. "He works from the outside in. The physicality is very, very important, at least when it's called upon. It's something he really knows how to address as an actor and be creative with.

"And then once he has it, once the cameras are rolling, everything's coming from the inside out. Russell's not alone in his ability to do that, but he's among the elite."