RUSTY’S GLADIATOR SECRETS REVEALED!
His character promised to unleash hell – and the actor did just that on set
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Gladiator, a movie that grossed almost a billion dollars at the box office and scored five Oscars.
Not bad considering its star, Russell Crowe, who played sandal-clad muscleman Maximus Decimus Meridius, moodily proclaimed during filming that it would be a dud – and it wasn’t even because he had to lose almost 20kg within a few months to play the ripped Roman warrior.
Given that everything that could’ve gone wrong during filming did, you can’t blame Russell for his gloomy outlook.
Sources from the set say the actor, now 56, feared the constantly changing script would put a pin on his promising career, which explains why four weeks before filming was due to start, a foul-tempered Russell was still storming out of table reads.
Insiders say he took issue to almost everything about the movie. “It was sh*t,” the grumpy
leading man said of
‘The script is sh*t... but I’m the greatest actor in the world’
the script. “But I’m the greatest actor in the world and I can make even sh*t sound good.”
But then there was the very real pain that awaited Russell once cameras began rolling – the then mid-30s antipodean icon copped a cracked hip bone, a fractured foot and a recurring torn Achilles tendon.
“If you’re rolling around on the ground with gigantic sequences and hundreds of moods of choreography... of course there’s going to be injuries,” he later said. “But when you’re younger, you’re made of rubber, and you can bounce back again.”
His co-star Djimon Hounsou, who played Juba, once sheepishly admitted the lines between acting and real fighting would often be blurred, admitting he accidentally stabbed someone in the head.
“Most of us got carried away and I think when you’re truly doing it for real, the ‘pretend’ goes out of the way and the emotion takes over, so a lot of people got hurt.”
The biggest tragedy to befall the disaster-riddled set was when screen legend Oliver Reed died while they were on location in Malta.
Insiders recall the two men, despite both being heavy partiers at the time, “despised each other” – which may have been
Russell’s saving grace, given that Oliver collapsed in a bar and died from a heart attack aged 61 after challenging British sailors to a drinking competition.
“If Russell and Oliver were mates, it would’ve been a recipe for an even bigger disaster,” an insider tells Woman’s Day. “Imagine those two egging each other on.”
In an interview with GQ some time later, Russell said, “I have seen [Oliver] walk down the street in Malta drunk as a lord and just hit anybody he got near to – even a man walking with his children. I just found that to be... not impressive.”