“It was a fiasco”: When Russell Crowe replaced Brad Pitt to save Kevin Macdonald’s ‘State of Play’
In 2007, Brad Pitt hit it off with a director who wanted him to star in a big-screen remake of an iconic BBC political thriller. Over the next two years, he and the director worked on different incarnations of the script, all while Pitt shot David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading. However, only a week before cameras were due to roll, the Se7en star dropped out of the project, which left the director scrambling to find a replacement.
If he hadn’t, the production would have collapsed, and Pitt would have been open to legal action – but then a star the director considered even better than Pitt stepped in to save the day.
When Kevin Macdonald met Pitt on the set of Benjamin Button in New Orleans, the two men immediately bonded. Macdonald was riding high on The Last King of Scotland, which had received rapturous reviews in 2006, and he was already prepping his follow-up, a Hollywood version of a hit BBC series from 2003. State of Play was about a journalist investigating the murder of a Member of Parliament’s researcher in London. However, Macdonald’s version would switch the action to the corridors of power in Washington, DC, and he envisioned it as an All the President’s Men-esque newspaper movie, as opposed to a political thriller.
Pitt liked what Macdonald was selling and signed up to play the journalist, while his old Fight Club mucker Edward Norton came on board as the politician. Over the next couple of years, though, Macdonald and Pitt clashed repeatedly over the script. Macdonald knew that the six-hour series would have to be seriously streamlined and reshaped to become a movie, but he felt Pitt wanted it to stick closely to the original. “I think movies have to be really simple,” Macdonald told The Guardian. “You can’t be too complicated in a two-hour film. But he wanted to have so many characters from the original State of Play, so many of the incidents. I just couldn’t see how it would work.”
Worse than this disagreement over the adaptation, though, was the sneaking suspicion both men had that Pitt probably wasn’t right for the role. “The journalist has receded into himself in some way,” Macdonald reasoned. “He’s a slightly closed-off, schlumpy kind of person.” In the script, he also struggled with women, and Macdonald couldn’t wrap his head around that ever being a problem for someone as ludicrously handsome as Pitt. He concluded, “There’s something very damaged about McAffrey and, again, I’m not sure Brad would be good at damaged.”
It all led to November 2007, when Pitt left the movie after two weeks of intensive negotiations. “It was a fiasco,” Macdonald admitted. “A week before shooting, I was left with this $2million set of a newspaper room; it was dressed and ready to go. I was thinking it was all going to be knocked down unless I could find another actor.” He insisted that he felt no ill will toward Pitt on a personal level, but couldn’t deny that he’d left the entire production up a certain creek without a paddle. In fact, Universal told Pitt that if Macdonald couldn’t find a replacement in a week, which would allow the movie to go ahead as scheduled, it would sue him.
However, a saviour was at hand. The studio asked Macdonald who his ideal replacement would be and he immediately said, “Russell Crowe.” Within days, he jetted off to Crowe’s Australian ranch, where he had lunch with the star and his parents, took a tour of the grounds, and sold him on State of Play. Crowe’s mum then dropped Macdonald back to the airport, and before he knew it, the movie had a new leading man.
“There are only a handful of actors who can get a Hollywood movie made,” Macdonald revealed. “Russell is the best, so he was my first choice.” Then, in what sounded like an exceedingly thinly veiled dig at Pitt, he added that Crowe is “a real actor; an actor before he’s a movie star. We lost Brad, but we gained someone better.”
