Why Ron Howard compared Russell Crowe to a tropical storm: “You wish it would stop raining”
Since he’s too much of a nice guy to be openly critical of the people he’s worked with, Ron Howard instead tied himself in knots trying to come up with the perfect analogy to describe an actor who’d earned a reputation for being a tricky customer on set.
That’s not to say they’re a full-blown arsehole that filmmakers and co-stars dreaded working with, although there has been a bit of that over the years, but they were so intense and invested in their preparations that Howard pretty much said that he’d like them to lighten the fuck up.
Being a method actor and encountering Ron Howard must be a strange thing. They dedicate themselves to their performance for months, live the role, bring it with them everywhere they go, and then they spend weeks, if not months, dealing with someone who has positivity coming out of their every pore.
The two-time Academy Award winner doesn’t get flustered, doesn’t get stressed, doesn’t lose his shit, and he doesn’t fall out with anyone, ever, so it’s only natural that when he was confronted with one of the industry’s most precocious new A-listers, he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
Little did he, or anyone else, know at the time, but Russell Crowe peaked in the early 2000s. Three consecutive Oscar nominations for The Insider, Gladiator, and Howard’s ‘Best Picture’ winner A Beautiful Mind had planted him on top as one of the industry’s most in-demand leading men, but it was to be short-lived.
He continued headlining movies, sure, but he never again scaled those turn-of-the-millennium heights. These days, he’s having a blast hamming his way through a slew of B-tier genre flicks, and fair fucks. Two and a half decades, though, his reputation was far from gleaming, with Crowe known for being sullen, short-tempered, and prone to the occasional outburst.
On the plus side, when they reunited for 2005’s Cinderella Man, Howard knew exactly what he was getting into. “Directing Russell is like shooting on a tropical island,” he informed Newsweek. “The weather is going to change several times a day, but you’re shooting there for a reason. Sometimes, those dark clouds are what you need.”
That was the operative word, since he immediately suggested that it would be nice if he wasn’t so intense all the time. “And sometimes,” Howard added. “You wish it would stop raining so you can do the sunny scene.” In Crowe’s defence, Cinderella Man wasn’t a very sunny film, and he’d put himself through the wringer by spending months training to adequately convince as the Depression-era boxer, Jim Braddock.
Howard even claimed they were even looking for a third picture to collaborate on, but since 20 years have passed and it hasn’t happened, maybe those rainy days became too much to handle.
