No more heroes: when Hollywood’s leading men turn nasty
Russell Crowe’s new role shows how the mature A-lister can remain relevant.
It’s 20 years since Russell Crowe won his Oscar as the grittily heroic Maximus Decimus Meridius in Gladiator. The contrast with his latest role, as a psychopathic stalker in the roadrage thriller Unhinged, could hardly be more intense. You’ve never seen Crowe act with such fuming malevolence, or look so atrocious. His character leads from the gut, which bulges out from his khakis as if about to blow at any second.
There’s always been a volatile edge to Crowe, as many who have fallen foul of his notoriously quicktempered press junkets will testify. But this is the first man he has played who goes after his ex-wife with a raised hammer, brains her new partner in passing, and sets their house on fire. That’s just the opening scene.
The casting has shock value because of all the virtuous men of action Crowe used to play in what now feels like a past life. Crowe has unmistakable mileage on him, having lately settled into a range of superdad supporting roles – as Jor-El in Man of Steel (2013), say – rather than being the main event.
But he’s nothing if not the main event in Unhinged. It exemplifies a midcareer pivot which Crowe and his agents are far from the first to exploit. The matinee idol bloom has faded; sex appeal feels a way off; even your credentials as a resilient tough guy have gone to seed. It’s time to ring those changes and gravitate to the dark side.
Almost every man with a substantial acting résumé has done it – the only question is how soon. Crowe is 56. Richard Gere was still a lithe, foxy 41 when he reinvented himself by playing a vicious cop in Internal Affairs (1990) – one of his best performances, because it interlaced the Gere smarm with a genuinely skin-crawling menace.
Around the same era, Tom Cruise was the young pretender, but he kept trying to rough up his cocky image by playing broken men and vampires. It wasn’t until his hitman in Collateral (2004) – same age as Gere, give or take – that he gave us an all-out bad egg, and he didn’t want anyone to miss the metamorphosis, flagging it with a shock of silvery hair to mark the arrival of Mean Adult Cruise. If we’re honest, the overall transformation only half came off – it felt cosmetic and premature, the character more a slick cipher than a sociopath of substance.
Cruise should have waited, and remembered how Henry Fonda nailed it: by looking like none other than Henry Fonda. Beloved by American audiences as a noble gunslinger, a soft-spoken crusader for justice and liberty, the star was 63 when he went against type to play Frank, the pitiless railroad assassin in Sergio Leone’s frontier epic Once
Upon a Time in the West (1968). Assuming that a physical change was appropriate, Fonda arrived on set wearing dark-brown contact lenses, but Leone took them out. He wanted those baby blue eyes to feel at once disturbingly recognisable and chillingly incongruous for the role of a child killer.
Still, if the idea is to make the outer shell of a character match the rot inside, no one would master this better than Orson Welles. He’d been practising from youth. At 25, the beaming boy wonder of Citizen Kane
(1941) aged up threefold as the dying Kane, a crumbling wreck with a wasted life slipping through his fingers. He played hide-and-seek with his acting career through middle age. Audiences saw Welles slip off into Vienna’s sewers as The Third Man’s charming but unconscionable Harry Lime, then vanish into obscure projects and Shakespearean maquillage.
Then, boom – no one was quite prepared for the foul pig who loomed up in his comeback picture, Touch of Evil (1958): the bloated and grotesquely corrupt police captain Hank Quinlan. However augmented by brilliant make-up, the sheer shock of Welles’s genuine decrepitude in that role made everyone shudder.
Jaws might drop just as much for anyone jumping from Gladiator to Unhinged in one bound. But it’s not just extreme makeovers that help breaking bad pay off as a career move. It’s also about tapping an actor’s latent potential – Crowe’s hot spleen, or Denzel Washington’s distant cool (in 2001’s Training Day) – and turning up the dial.
After years and years of Robin Williams trying – straining – to delight us hyperactively with his comic talent, audiences were ready for the mask to slip. The sadder side was always there, regularly slathered in syrup, but then there was a sudden phase of Williams embracing a fully creepy side, too.
It landed in 2002. Just that year, he played a devious killer with paedophilic tendencies in Insomnia, an unstable stalker in One Hour Photo, and a disgraced former children’s TV host bent on revenge in the little-seen
Death to Smoochy. These appearances were very much like the hired party clown going postal in front of the kids.
Such effects can be sprung not just as a film’s selling point but its secret weapon. Look at what they did with Harrison Ford’s shifty husband in What Lies Beneath (2000), in which we wondered anew (but have perhaps always secretly wondered?) how trustworthy Ford’s characters are, deep down.
Like Washington, Michael Douglas took his Best Actor Oscar home when he played his first morally bankrupt lead, Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987). But there was more to come. When he wanted to shift further sideways from his run of roles as a yuppie in hot water, he chose the pungently weird vehicle Falling Down (1993) to do so.
That film – by Joel Schumacher, who died last month – foreshadows Unhinged with its vision of gridlocked America at boiling point. It can’t decide if Douglas’s D-Fens, an aggrieved dad under a restraining order, is its villain or hero, which is where these films diverge in speaking to their moment. By the time men’s rights are in Crowe’s thoroughly toxic hands, no one hesitates to boo.
It’s telling that only one A-list megastar from the older generation has never – yet – wanted to go full psycho. As usual, Tom Hanks is the shining exception that proves the rule. America’s one-time sweetheart and favourite plucky soldier has almost never turned nasty, unless you count a few of his wacky featured turns in Cloud Atlas (2012) and a couple of early blips – his sour, egomaniacal stand-up comedian in Punchline (1988) and – up to a point – the alcoholic baseball manager in A League of Their Own (1992). Hanks has sometimes said he couldn’t summon the darkness to be convincingly malign. Either it will never suit that Capra-esque persona of his to betray our faith, or the moment hasn’t arrived, like it did for Fonda at his age. If cinema’s Mr Nice were ever to turn on us with a sudden leer or a bestial snarl, we might well feel that nothing was sacred.
Unhinged is released on Friday
When Tom Cruise played the villain in ‘Collateral’, he wanted us all to notice