The one co-star who disgusted Russell Crowe: “We never had a pleasant conversation”
Having been tarred with the dreaded ‘difficult’ brush himself on the odd occasion, Russell Crowe ran the risk of throwing stones in a glasshouse when he criticised the conduct of a former co-star.
On paper, being compared to a tropical storm hardly sounds like a denigration of someone’s character. However, when the person making that comparison is Ron Howard, roundly regarded as one of Hollywood’s nicest fellas, it’s the equivalent of someone else saying that you’re a bit of a dick.
He’s always been known as an intense and committed performer, maybe less so now that he’s spending most of his time hamming it up in second-string genre films, but any actor who immerses themselves in their process can find themselves making life difficult for the performers and filmmakers in their orbit.
There were also the off-camera incidents that earned him some bad buzz, whether he was calling his peers sell-outs, brawling backstage at awards shows, or lobbing phones at hotel employees, but the one thing the Academy Award winner would never dream of calling himself is a hard-man or a hell-raiser.
“People try to hang the hell-raiser bullshit on me, but it could not be further from the reality,” he maintained to Andy Morris. “I have a few nights, as everyone does. And there was certainly a period of time where the impact of fame was something I railed against. I am over that now.”
However, whether he fits the bill or not, he spent plenty of time with one of the industry’s most notorious hell-raisers when shooting Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, with Oliver Reed failing to survive the shoot when he suffered a heart attack and died in May 1999 after engaging in a drinking contest with a group of sailors on shore leave.
“I never got on with Ollie,” Crowe revealed. “He has visited me in dreams and asked me to talk kindly of him. So I should. But we never had a pleasant conversation.” Reed’s hard-drinking and hard-partying antics were the stuff of legend, but Crowe was more disgusted than anything else by his behaviour.
“I have seen him 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,” he remembered. “I just found that to be… not impressive.” He may have been lauded for his boozing, which became the stuff of legend, but Crowe found it to be the opposite.
“He drank himself to death,” he stated. “He sat on a bar stool until he fell off it and carried on drinking, lying in his own piss and vomit; he continued to drink until he passed out. In the end, he created such a weird energy around him that no one drinking with him cared.”
The Gladiator headliner may not have wanted to speak ill of the dead, but it’s clear that he abhorred the way that Reed lived his life.
