‘LA Confidential’: the role Russell Crowe was nearly forced out of
In the late 1990s, Russell Crowe exploded onto the Hollywood scene as a tough cop in a 1950s-set noir that landed nine Academy Award nominations. He had been working his way up the ranks in America for a few years previously, thanks to supporting parts in films like Virtuosity and The Quick and the Dead, but this was the first lead role the firebrand New Zealand star could sink his teeth into. Amazingly, though, Crowe would later claim the studio didn’t want him in the part and did everything it could to sabotage his participation in the film.
When Curtis Hanson was casting self-righteous bruiser Officer Bud White in his adaptation of James Ellroy’s classic novel LA Confidential, he thought of Crowe. He had seen the actor be “repulsive and scary but captivating” in 1992’s Romper Stomper, where he played a skinhead neo-Nazi. To him, Crowe was the perfect choice to inhabit White’s brutish exterior, which hides the soul of an insecure little boy.
Hanson also wanted to cast the similarly unknown Guy Pearce in the other lead part, as he believed it would work better for the film if audiences were less familiar with the stars. To him, it meant the movie could subsequently come close to translating his experience of reading Ellroy’s book. He told the Boston Herald, “You don’t like any of these characters at first, but the deeper you get into their story, the more you begin to sympathise with them. I didn’t want actors audiences knew and already liked.”
To Hanson’s chagrin, though, Warner Brothers wasn’t exactly jumping for joy at the idea of casting two relative unknowns in the lead parts. Thankfully, the film was produced by Arnon Milchan’s New Regency, and Milchan supported Hanson’s desire to cast the two young stars. Hanson told the Dallas Observer, “His backing me at the start about those two guys empowered me with every move I made from then on.”
At Milchan’s encouragement, Hanson balanced out his lesser-known leads by filling out his cast with some well-known names, including Kevin Spacey, Kim Basinger, and Danny DeVito. Still, the studio was slow to truly get on board with – as they allegedly called them – the two “Australians”. This disrespect rankled Crowe and Pearce, as even though both grew up in Australia, Crowe is from New Zealand, and Pearce was born in England.
In 2023, Crowe confirmed to Vanity Fair, “The studio didn’t want me to be in that role. They wanted, I think, Sean Penn and Robert De Niro in the film or something. Things that they could quantify and understand.”
In the early days of the film’s production, Crowe is adamant Warner Brothers actually resorted to dirty tactics to force him to quit the role. At this point in his career, Crowe wasn’t exactly flush with cash despite landing a leading role in a big-budget Hollywood film, and the studio knew this. Horrifyingly, he claimed, “A few days into the rehearsals, the studio stopped paying the bill at the hotel, and they stopped paying for my rental car.”
It sounds farcical now, given what a major player Crowe became in Hollywood within the next few years, but for four or five days while he rehearsed LA Confidential, he did everything he could to avoid the hotel manager. He confessed, “I was leaving the hotel…by going down the back stairs because I knew the manager of the hotel was waiting for me in the foyer to ask when the bill was going to be paid.”
It was a horrible situation because Crowe knew that if he complained or tried to make a stand by saying, “I’m not turning up to work”, the studio would have the ammunition it needed to fire him. Around this time, he also began hearing rumours from people he knew in the business that he was about to be replaced by Penn.
In the face of this negativity, though, Crowe did the only thing he could do: he kept showing up every single day. Eventually, the rumours stopped swirling, the studio began paying for things again, and Crowe became one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising stars thanks to the very role the studio tried to take away from him.
