Russell Crowe names the most ridiculous scene of his career: “Peter Weir didn’t ask me to do that”
Russell Crowe has had the quintessential career of two halves.
Since breaking out in the late 1990s with the likes of LA Confidential and The Insider, his profile exploded when he starred in Ridley Scott’s Roman romp Gladiator. After that, he picked up an Oscar, a couple of Golden Globes, and basically any roles he wanted, yet this momentum wasn’t meant to last.
These days, Crowe has something of a reputation for making duds. The last decade or so has yielded two subpar superhero flicks in the form of Thor: Love and Thunder and Kraven the Hunter, a couple of dodgy horror films and, lest we forget, the tragic reboot of The Mummy.
He’s done a lot of weird stuff and, given how little he seems to care about what people think of him, that’s not going to change any time soon.
Settling on his most bizarre outing is a hard task, even for the man himself; however, Crowe was able to come up with an answer when being interviewed by GQ. He took the time to shout out a very odd film that few people will have even heard of, let alone seen, but he had an absolute blast making it.
“I went to China and I made The Man with the Iron Fists, directed by RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan,” he recalled, “People were like, ‘What the hell are you doing that for?’ And I was like: ‘Well, I really believe in Bobby Diggs, RZA’. I definitely know that he’s got a director’s brain and that he understands film, and when else am I ever gonna get to play a character like this? Who’s, like, blowing bubbles in a bath because he’s pulling anal beads out of [someone] in Shanghai, in whatever the year was supposed to be? Peter Weir didn’t ask me to do that.”
Released in 2012, The Man with the Iron Fists is a martial arts movie directed by, written by, and starring the legendary rapper, where RZA plays the titular character, a blacksmith who, after having his arms cut off by a vicious mercenary, crafts himself two prosthetics made out of a powerful metal. Crowe plays a British soldier with the brilliant name Jack Knife, and the scene he is referring to is equal parts hilarious and disgusting and definitely worth checking out.
The New Zealand-born star might have enjoyed working on this madcap project, but everyone else wasn’t super enthused, with the film barely scraping back its budget. Alongside Crowe and RZA, other cast members included Lucy Liu, Dave Bautista, and Pam Grier, and given the wide appeal of those names, those returns must have been disappointing. Critics were split over the content itself, where some long-term martial arts fans praised the musician for his dedication to the genre, and others felt like it was too wedded to these tropes.
Crowe might not have gotten another Oscar out of this venture, but he seemed to have earned a strange sense of self-satisfaction, while also getting the chance to make friends with a guy from the freakin’ Wu Tang Clan, which is worth more than any award.
