The injuries at the heart of Russell Crowe’s career: “It was terrible”
There are some actors whose very physicality seems to dominate the screen, and throughout his remarkable career, New Zealand’s Russell Crowe has commanded audiences’ attention with a series of impressive action-heavy displays, and his physique and strength have often been the centre-piece of his efforts.
Even though Crowe is more than capable of handling himself from a dramatic standpoint, it’s fair to say that he’s at his best when wielding a sword in the likes of Gladiator, a bow and arrow in Robin Hood or donning the gloves in Cinderella Man. Invariably, though, this kind of commitment to physical acting tends to leave scars on those who profess, as Crowe himself has found well over the years.
In a feature with Vulture, Crowe explained the injuries that he’s suffered on set and the risks he’s taking in bringing his acclaimed pictures to life. For starters, the actor is missing the cartilage in his toes as a result of fight sequences, as shown in the Ron Howard boxing film Cinderella Man. “Sometimes you have to stop abruptly because if you don’t, either you stop or you die,” he said. “You get run over or something. So that’s where that one comes from.”
Even as far back as 1999, Crowe had put his body on the line for his profession and had torn his Achilles tendons in both feet in the hockey comedy-drama Mystery Alaska. “I was wearing ice skates 12, 14 hours a day, and my feet just didn’t grow up that way,” he said before admitting that the tendons were further ruptured by Gladiator and Cinderella Man.
Gladiator, a physical performance of Crowe’s by every stretch of the imagination, seems to have been a big one for the actor in terms of injuries, and his disintegrated hip goes back to a fall he had on the Ridley Scott epic. Robin Hood had also proven to be hazardous, and the actor destroyed the bone marrow edemas in his knees, remembering, “A 14-foot jump, but I don’t have the flexibility in my Achilles anymore to actually absorb the hit, so I have to hit flat-footed, and they didn’t prep the ground. So I hit flat-footed on rock-solid dirt. It was terrible.”
If all that wasn’t bad enough, then Crowe’s shoulder also took a beating, first on a film that wasn’t even released. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, really,” he said. “I was doing a thing where I was lifting a girl up doing some gymnastics stuff, and I was listening to the trainer talking, and I had my hands up where she was supposed to put her feet, but I wasn’t ready, and she stepped on my arms both at the same time and pulled and just tore the labrum tissue.”
Crowe’s shoulder was again the victim of another operation-requiring injury in Cinderella Man, with the actor signing off, “I was in the middle of an actual boxing fight, and this Canadian former-Olympic-level boxer took my elbow out which subluxated my shoulder, which exacerbated a problem that was already there.” And somehow, the legendary New Zealand actor is still going strong.
