The movie Russell Crowe regretted turning down: “I felt there was a cheating aspect to it”
It wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that Russell Crowe found himself being in the position to turn down offers for roles that came his way, but it took him an awfully long time to reach that point in the first place.
The actor made his screen debut as a child all the way back in 1972, before a stint on Neighbours a decade and a half later saw him become one of the earliest beneficiaries of the talent pipeline that’s been providing Hollywood with a new influx of Antipodean soap opera stars every generation since the 1980s.
It was 1992’s Romper Stomper that first put him on the map film-wise, but that didn’t make him a man in demand who had their pick of the parts. That came eventually, though, with Crowe winning an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, which came in the middle of his three consecutive nominations in the same category on either side of Michael Mann’s The Insider and Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind.
After that, he was a fixture of the A-list who found himself under consideration for a number of high-profile gigs, but it was a project very close to his heart that he ended up declining for personal reasons. Regardless of the quality he’s produced over the years, it can’t be argued that Crowe has gone out of his way to continue furthering his lifelong love affair with music.
He recorded a single in the early 1980s under the stage name of Russ le Roq, and served as the frontman for 30 Odd Foot of Grunts between their inception in 1992 and dissolution in 2005 before forming a new band, The Ordinary Fear of God shortly after. His widely derided performance in Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables did indicate that musicals weren’t going to be the best use of his talents, but he ended up rejecting the chance to mount a biopic of a musician he was an active fan of.
While he didn’t name the artist in question, Crowe admitted to GQ that because of his own music career, he didn’t think he’d earned – or deserved – the opportunity to portray someone who he presumably finds so iconic that he couldn’t place his self-consciousness to one side in order to embody a figure who meant an awful lot to him personally.
“There was an experience that I was offered; I now know the director, and I know that him and I working together, surrounded by music, would’ve been a fantastic experience. It was a biopic of a musician that I love,” he said. “I kind of felt there was a cheating aspect to it, you know. It would put me in a position from a music career perspective that I wouldn’t have earned.”
The identity of the subject remains unrevealed, but with Crowe now into his 60s and embracing his new direction as a journeyman character actor with a soft spot for ham, the moment has probably passed.
