With a big thanks to Ruth.... images that go with the article are now HERE

GQ

March 2005

If the world pegs you as boorish, cocky and self-righteous, perhaps that's just the price for keeping up your standards in a world where fewer and fewer people seem to care about doing going work. Chris Heath drifts out to sea with Russell Crowe and discovers that beneath the tabloid tough-guy exterior beats a punk-rock heart.

Russell Crowe passes me a meat pie and shows me how to slather tomato sauce over its crust. These local delicacies he thoughtfully picked up before we boarded this boat, the boat he has borrowed in order to surround us with the beauty of Sidney Harbor as we talk. Occasionally, he comments on the sights: a passing yacht with a revolutionary swinging keel, tower architectural abominations here and there, the amusement park he used play in as a kid—where, he explains, everyone use to get off inside the Ghost Train's haunted house, and where some of them remained when the original structure burned down in the late '70s.

What's the point of acting?

Communication, I think. Storytelling. Its roots are age-old and part of who we are as humans. You know, playing John Nash [1] in a movie is the same as me telling a joke in a bar. It's just a performance. It's the same job as the bloke that used to hold the talking stick aloft and talk about when the first canoe arrived. Except that subject matters these days can be more and more complicated. But the essential, simple point is just basic communication of really complicated ideas and emotions—particularly in the cinema, when a little blink can have a gigantic resonance. [pauses]  Or do you mean the point of it in my life?

Well, I guess that's the next question—why do you do it?

I'm fundamentally quite shy, so that thing of taking on another character is quite a liberating thing to do if you're a shy person, because within that character framework you can now go to all these other places. [pauses]  And I never found another job that I was actually that good at.

That's not people's first perception of you, as shy.

No, but you're also talking about two or three decades into doing the job. I did my first acting thing in 1970. [2] Sure, it's very easy for me now to be up-front and open with people in my time, so you kind of get past that. But if I want to do something that is going to emotionally expose the character I'm playing, it still requires me to really understand the whole broad spectrum of varying emotions you can pull… [pauses; grimaces slightly] … uh… I don't know where the fuck I'm going with this. [to himself] Just simplify it. [to me] Because it's really hard to explain, because it's a fucking prick of a job, you know? Particularly when you get successful with it… People don't understand why your life suddenly changed when, hey, to them it's fucking ten bucks at the movies, it's over in a couple of hours. They don't understand the prep, they don't understand the real physical shit that you put yourself through. I mean, the last movie's an example [3] — shoulder surgery partway through preparation. And it's a $100 million train, man, and I'm the fucking guy that drives the train. And I've got to get back on that train and make sure that this thing is completed. And not everybody takes it seriously, you know… If it's not going to be that serious, I don't want to do it. It's a personal taste. I don't like watching an actor have the same fucking hairdo from time period to time period, from character to character—I just think it's bullshit. It's a waste of money and a waste of my time as an audience member.

Do you think those actors are just not trying hard enough?

I just don't think they care. They don't care.

That makes you angry?

It doesn't make me angry. It's just not the way I want to do it… If you've got your memory of the last thing I was in that you saw, the next time you see me on-screen you go, "Is that him?"

But that's one of the contradictions of the modern movie industry. So much is devoted to building up actors as icons, and yet the whole essence of believable cinema is that you need to not think about who the actor is when you're watching a character.

Yeah, well, I try and avoid it as much as possible. I don't use my "celebrity" to make a living. I don't do ads for suits in Spain like George Clooney, or cigarettes in Japan like Harrison Ford. [4] And on one level, people go, "Well, more fault [to] you, mate, because there's free money to be handed out." But to me it's kind of sacrilegious—it's a complete contradiction of the fucking social contract you have with your audience. I mean, Robert De Niro's advertising American Express.

What do you make of that?

Gee whiz, it's not the first time he's disappointed me. [laughs]  It's been happening for a while now.

If you did all that, what do you think you would be losing?

The first thing that goes out the door is complete integrity. I'm the sort of bloke that will have stand-up arguments with producers, saying "Look, mate, I know you're product-placing that fucking thing." If I can see it, I'm just not going to allow it to happen… You lose all of your integrity as soon as you cross over into that sort of crass commercialism.

I agree with you, but I think we live in an age when most of the audience couldn't care less.

Certainly a generation of journalists that I talk to don't understand. They actually think that I'm being stupid, you know? That kind of credibility thing doesn’t get me any Brownie points at all. There doesn't seem to be that understanding of why you bother to not prostitute yourself.

A lost of people seem to think, This stuff is one big selling machine, so chill out.

It absolutely have—in my mind, in my heart, in my being—the credibility required to be a serious artist, as laid down by NME in 1976. [5] That's what I fucking believe in, and I'll never change.

What sort of stuff inspired you in that era?

Individual artists? Elvis Costello. The Pistols—but the Pistols was just a laugh.

I don't think it seemed like a laugh at the time. I don't know if you're being wise after the even. It was a laugh, but it mattered, too.

[nods] It really mattered. It really mattered… And Sham 69, the Only Ones'' "Another Girl, Another Planet," [6] the Buzzcocks… I get a very deep sense that the generation after Generation X is a very conservative generation and I'm not sure they understand the commitment part of what I do. I'm not sure if we'll every be able to regain that ground… I quite often feel like I'm the youngest of the old guys, where I've got some really old-fashioned philosophies about what's credible and what's not… Suddenly, someone like me seems like a dinosaur from a different age, but I hope it's the opposite of that. I hope I'm at the forefront of thinking and it'll all come back to that at some point.

But if you are a dinosaur, you're proud to be that?

In those respects—credibility, integrity for the work—absolutely. I don't think there needs to be another bloke who wants to be a superhero. I think there needs to be more people who are prepared to do the nuts and bolts of the job emotionally, and to take people on those journeys. I just did a movie about a boxer, and I've seen it, and I've seen its effect on people already, and this isn't a movie with tricks. There's no animated bits, no bits of cartoon, no utility belt, no laser guns. It's just one bloke, you know? I mean, I'm 40 years old now, so to get in that sort of shape… Jack Aubrey [7] was 228 pounds, Jimmy the Boxer was 172. So there's all the training up to the shoot, [8] but then during the shoot you have to keep training. But I watch the film, and I see it's effect on people, and I know that every one of those miles has something to do with that connection.

Everyone of those miles you ran?

Yep. Every one of the miles I did, they're in my eyes.

He waited years for Cinderella Man. He tells me how he loved the script when he first read it in 1997 and details the various times when it seemed as though it wouldn't be his role—when Penny Marshall was going to direct or Billy Bob Thornton (with Ben Affleck as the lead) or Lasse Halstrom, and how, at one point, Crowe encouraged Harvey Weinstein to buy the project:

            "But that was just before he called me at about quarter to nine in the morning and wanted me to magically turn up for a meeting at twelve o'clock in Tribeca, but I was doing press around Central park, I was, 'Look mate, can't do it.' So he told me to get fucked. I rang my agent and said, 'Hey, Harvey just told me to get fucked before 9 A.M.' He goes, 'Oh, my God, what do you think that means?' I said, 'I think it means we're getting somewhere.'"

I presume that you're the kind of person who, when someone tells you to get fucked, that doesn't preclude your having a working relationship with them?

No, because he was justifiably annoyed, because I'd been following another project for three and a half years and he had got me what he thought was what I required. But I was fucking right about that movie, too. [9] It was a 100 percent fucking home run, except the central character of William Shakespeare was not a fucking writer—he was not smelly enough, he was not unshaven enough, and obviously hadn't had enough to drink. He was some prissy pretty boy. What the fuck? That's so disrespectful.

And you had in mind a smelly, unshaven drunk guy you thought could do it?

Yeah, I wanted to see that grizzly fucker. I wanted to see him flower. I wanted to see him blossom under the fact of love. I wanted to see where the sonnets came from. They came from the same pen of despair that wrote Timon of Athens—I wanted to see that guy. I wanted to see that guy with the sensibilities of a man that could create a body of work that would last century after century. I wanted to see that.

And you wanted to be that?

I wanted to play that character. I loved the script. I mean, it was an incredibly well observed script about actors. That's why I thought it was so cool.

Do you still think your version would have been better?

[laughs] By fucking miles, mate. What are you talking about?

Well, people loved it, I guess.

They did; they loved the movie. [pauses] I don't know—I suppose I'm still too young to say everything I want to say, though nobody'd ever give me credit for holding anything back. But I do… I just have no desire ore need to slag Joe Fiennes. But I would look at that particular thing differently. I see the opportunity differently.

As well as acting, you started playing guitar and writing songs at a young age.

Yeah—7, 8, 9.

What would the 9-year-old you write a song about?

Things that I didn't really have any understanding about, probably. Songs about love and all that sort of stuff.

And if you'd thought you were channeling someone, who would it have been?

It's really fundamentally boring, but it was Elvis. I used to watch a lot of Elvis movies. And that time period was his big Vegas song period: "Suspicious Minds" and "In the Ghetto," I remember being allowed to stay up late to watch Elvis live from Hawaii. Shit, that was disappointing. When he came on TV, I went to my brother, "Who the fuck's that. That's Elvis? Damn." You weren't getting breathless with him; he was just getting breathless all by himself.

You didn't do your first movie until you were 25. Most people who make anything of acting had success far earlier.

A lost of it had to do with the music, because that was my primary focus. Also, until I was 25, I had one tooth missing. When George Ogilvie [10] cast me, he asked me about it, and I told him the story [11] and that I thought it was very false of me to go and get a tooth cap. He was very nice about it, listened to it all, and said, "All right, well, let me put it this way, Russell. You're playing the lead character in my film, right? The character of Johnny has two front teeth…"

He Methoded you into it!

Yeah. See, I don't have a method. I don't follow anybody in particular. When people talk about Laurence Olivier or something, I go, "Fuck, man, once you've had De Niro in Raging Bull, that's where you begin."

It seems insane that you hadn't replaced the tooth for fifteen years…

Yeah, but at the same time, what it prevented me from doing was pretty-boy stuff. Somehow, it gave me an edge. I was sort of accepted into the rock 'n' roll thing a lot easier because I had this fucking half a tooth.

What about in your life away from acting and singing.

Well, it made relationships with girls a little difficult as well. [laughs]  Because I never used to smile.

Did you think of yourself as an attractive teenager?

I don't know. That's not really important.

That's its own answer too, isn't it?

[pauses]  Michael Mann was stunned when we were prepping The Insider, [12] because I was taking it to a place that fundamentally was something he didn't require… but I realized I couldn't play the guy unless I felt like I looked like the guy… On the set of Gladiator, I didn't have a very good relationship with the producers. I had a very good relationship with Ridley [Scott], but the producers couldn't understand why I wouldn't chill out. The reason I wouldn't chill out was because I knew that if I did fucking chill out, in those five minutes something stupid would now be in the movie. Like, they were trying to get me to do a love scene, and I'm saying to them, "What we're doing here is about the vengeance of a man whose wife has been killed—you cannot have him stop off for a little bit of nooky on the way." I've been told that Jeffrey Katzenburg [13] rang Michael Mann and said, "Look, this guy is just not rolling with the punches as we want him to, so what's it all about?" Michael said, "Well, if you're having problems like that with Russell, then you've got to know that you should just follow him…" Jeff said, "Is this about fucking ego and stuff?" and Michael started laughing. Because vanity doesn't come into it… Is it right for the fucking character?

But that's what people often think, don't they? They think it's ego and vanity.

Well, that the easiest thing for them to want to think. I'm sure at a certain point it's about self-protection and—if you want a real fucking word that smacks of ego and vanity—it's about protecting your legacy. The things that you've done previously and trying to get everything that you do to be that same standard. So yeah, I suppose there's egotism involved in that. But I don't give a fuck what I look like during a movie or between films. I couldn't care less. I don't have a certain haircut. I don't give a shit, you know? But on behalf of the character, particularly if it's a real person, now, that's a huge responsibility… Every now and then I say something like this and it just sounds so self-righteous—but if there's anything I'm aiming at, it is that I want there to be a trust between me and an audience. I want them to absolutely know that if I've done it, there's some really good fucking reasons; there's something special about it. Sooner or later, the press, the magazine shit, the tabloid sort of shit, that'll all go away; because no matter how many times they say it, it's still not going to be true. What is true is what I put down in movies. Even though it's pretend, that's the truth.

Of all the chatter you mention – "the press, the tabloid sort of shit" – what's the stuff that frustrates you the most?

I've always had a thing about being accused of something when I'm not guilty of it, you know? That goes right back to a primary-school thing. It's the thing that scares me the most—being blamed for something that I didn't do… And there's that "If you get accused of something and you get angry, then you must be guilty."

I knew you'd had some rough things said about you, but reading all the stuff in preparation for this, my God, you really have had some rough things said…

It's really been fucking ridiculous, man. I spent time like this last year with a guy from Time magazine…

I was just about to quote you from that. You're on the cover and yet, within two essentially laudatory pieces about you, they say you're someone who "comes off as a brute, a primitive: Crowe Magnon Man," that you are "frequently perceived as one of the world's biggest jerks."

By journalists. That's the bit that's missing.

What do you take from that?

Again, let's go back to Michael Mann, because he laughs at people who think that that description has any sort of accuracy. He just laughs at them. "How can you do the performances that he does if he's that guy? If he's that guy, how can he be Nash? How can he be Wigand? How can he be the guy in The Sum of Us? [14] How can this 'lout' have that level of sensitivity?"

Here's another one about you. "Crowe is consistently referred to by those who have worked with him as a 'perfectionist,' which in Hollywood, is a euphemism for 'jackass.'"

Unless they actually mean perfectionist. If they just mean, no, hold on, he wants it right… right on their behalf, too, not just for me… I say stupid things sometimes—like, I saw somebody taking the piss out of me on TV the other night [laughs] talking about working for a director and how I give them "a gold mine of ideas." And I was thinking, Gosh, I supposed that does sound arrogant and fucking stupid… And maybe it is arrogant and stupid. But, you know, it's still true. [laughs]

***

I went shopping with Danielle yesterday, and we were in a bookstore. And this woman actually said, "Look, Russell Crowe reads—who'd have know? [laughs]

That's pretty rude.

But this is my environment. This is what I live in, day to day.

***

Did you think you were special growing up? Did you think something special was going to happen to you?

[long pause]  Yeah, I did, actually. I used to have these very strange situations where I'd be walking down the street and I would imagine people calling out my name, I was as optimistic and as full of hope as anybody could be. And lots of things didn't turn out the way I wanted them to when I was a younger fella, but I didn't lose that thirst to understand what it is that I could do well.

When you were going to do Romper Stomper [15] did you realize this was going to be your chance to be noticed?

[nods]  I didn't think they were going make another movie like that in Australia for a line time.

You had to feed yourself a pretty unpleasant diet of reading and listening, didn't you? What do you remember about it?

Not much. There's a sort of filing system that you fill up and you empty. But stuff like reading Mein Kampf, it's nothing. I'm not reading it to take it in and believe in it, you know? I'm just reading it out of interest, and it focuses me, and through the act of reading I'm considering other aspects of the character as well.

But you'd really sit and listen to Wagner and English soccer crowds and go to sleep listening to white noise? That must have really fucked with your head.

Well, it kept me in an odd place. It kept me slightly unbalanced, and that's where I wanted to be while I was doing that role… A guy like Hando is abhorrent to me—the philosophy that governs his life is something that disgusts me completely—so that was an interesting learning experience.

The director also says that you got arrested during the shoot.

We did get arrested, but we weren't doing anything.

I heard that it was five times.

I'm not sure it was that many. One big night, nine of us got arrested. And we're not doing anything particular, we're not hanging out in skinhead hangouts, we're just going to regular pubs. However, we don't have any hair, and we've got serious sixteen-hole fucking Doc Martens with white laces, which signify to the police "white supremacy." In an odd way, I was kind of weirdly comforted that these nine or ten blokes walking around together in Melbourne would immediately attract attention from the police.

Did you immediately say, "No, sire, I'm an actor"?

Yeah, I mean, two constables came out and grabbed me and said, "Who do you think you are?" and all that sort of stuff. And I said, "Mate, I'll tell you exactly who we are—we're a group of actors, and we're doing a movie where we're playing neo-Nazi skinheads." And this sergeant of police in Melbournne says, "Is that right? Right. Well, I hope you're a Method actor, son, because you're really going to enjoy this. Put him in the fucking cell!" [laughs]  And at the time, I was really kind of angry, but over time you cannot help but laugh at that. That's funny as hell.

When the film came out, did you expect some people to misinterpret it and to assume wrong things about you?

Not to the degree. In its immediacy, it wasn't accepted very well at all. I'm not going to deny the power of the film, but I believed that the piece said, quite clearly, that if you believe in this philosophy, if you partake in this type of behavior, you're either dead or arrested by the end of the story.

I think that's true, but at the same time you can't be naïve enough not to know that some people will just enjoy seeing behavior and a way of life they like.

But in the full balance of what I've don as a career, [one of] the very next things that I did in terms of an Australian film was to play Jeff in The Sum of Us, knowing that there would be a certain amount of guys who lined up on day one because of Romper Stomper and they'll get a good surprise. [16]

Which was the first movie role you did where you felt you were really going somewhere?

In what terms?

Where you really felt, "I know what I'm doing"?

From a skill factor, I knew when I was doing Virtuosity, when I was working opposite Denzel [Washington], that I had the things, I needed and I could communicate the things that I had constructed intellectually and physically… But everything I've done in my career as a professional actor, it's like, I get the gig way after I've got the experience enough to do that gig. But yeah, you can follow the steps of it. Probably the biggest difference—the thing that really took my life and changed it, and made my relationship with the press a defensive one instead of one of tolerant amusement or whatever—was Meg Ryan. [17] And, gee whiz, I'm not going to apologize for that situation in my life. It's just there. Well, actually, that's wrong—I would apologize if there are people that were directly hurt from that situation. There was never any intention like that. Quite frankly, it was in the papers before it was a reality, you know? So we were already having to deal with the bullshit, and that possibly brought us close together, because we were both dealing with what it meant to be put in that situation.

***

He leads me back to the book-lined office of his waterfront Sydney home, disappears for a moment, and returns, his face full of fatherly delight, his 1-year-old son, Charlie, in his arms. When Charlie has taken his leave, Crowe suggests we listen to some music. He guides me through the highlights of (Last Night We Were) the Delicious Wolves, by the Canadian Hawksley Workman, a record Crowe was introduced to in Toronto by his Cinderella Man costar Renèe Zellweger. Together we take sensible mystified pleasure in the line You took your clothes off to remind me of the ocean. Then he asks whether I would like to hear his own latest song. He has been collaborating with a songwriter named Alan Doyle, from a Canadian band he likes called Great Big Sea; this new song, "Raewyn," has a different level of poise and grace than much of the records by Crowe's band, Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts, and its lyrics are both elegant and more direct. It draws on two traumatic early deaths in the Crowe family tree—his mother's sister Raewyn and his father's brother Charlie—and on his own new family, on how these are linked by name and heritage, and of what it is be a parent and child;

            "My mother's sister committed suicide when she was 21. Slashed her wrists in the bath. And my father's youngest brother died in a scuba-diving accident when he was 17. It just hadn't occurred to me what my father would have been able to say to my mother when she lost her sister, because he had had the same experience, and how close that must make them."

Growing up, were you very aware of all this history?

She died while I was alive. He died just before I was born. It was one of the odd things, when Dani wanted to call the baby Charlie and I said, "I don't think that'll go down very well in my family." We've had two Charles Crowes. One died scuba-diving at 17. The other, the uncle of my grandfather, died in the Battle of Britain at 21. But Dani had an Uncle Charlie who moved from York to Hollywood and lived till he was 96. So I went on two things: a combination of genes and third-time lucky.

What have forty-odd years of life taught you about love?

Um… [long pause] … I've got a really strong relationship with Dani that has scaffolding of years underneath it, and I've started to recognize that the things that were important were the ways we shared particular attitudes toward certain things, and the way that we could laugh about certain things. You know, I'm really young at this marriage thing, but there's some quite wonderful things that come into your life with marriage, you know, and we discuss it quite regularly, because we feel ourselves growing closer together. We can actually feel that happening. And centering what we have as marriage around the birth of Charlie, who came along probably faster that we were expecting, but we had both been celibate for the three months prior to the wedding…

How did the idea of three months come up?

We were having a chat and we said, "Okay, let's keep some distance between each other." Because I've got a lot of mates, and it seems to be that quite a high percentage of Australian marriages don't get—what's the word?

Consummated?

Consummated on the night. Thank you. And I didn't want to be in that category. But I think that three months meant that we were… in a certain particular place. And with the excitement of the wedding and the depth of the ceremony and stuff… it just made everything a little more magical too.

Is it true that you cried at your wedding?

Nor in the way it's reported. I didn't cry at Charlie's birth, either. I've got all the footage, and Dani actually said to me the next day, "You were fucking outrageous." Whenever I sense that she's getting a little uncomfortable, my focus is on her, but I make sure I put the camera somewhere where it gets a good two-shot. [laughs]  And I don't stop or anything—one minute I'm shooting her, and you can see a flicker of eyelid, of pain or whatever… I'm seeing her, seeing the pain… seeing the angle… going to her, checking she's okay… and then I'm back into it.

You were thinking about the lighting?

Totally! I've got cutaways. Anything interesting that's in the corridor. I've got a cutaway, too, I've got the feet of the nurse. She was wearing purple shoes. I've got lefts and rights, covered over shoulders both ways, just in case, because I didn't know how I'd want to do it.

There are times when you can be too professional…

But, see, it was probably easier for me to deal with this huge thing that was happening by having this little thing to do, which was keep the video camera going. Plus my wife has a record, an absolute record, of something that happened to her that she was not experiencing. And I know it sounds daggy [18] and what have you, but mate, it's a hell of a cool thing to watch. I'm not being self-defensive or whatever—I have absolutely no problem expressing myself. This thing of confusing Bud White [19] or Maximus with who I am is ridiculous. Like it's such a big fucking deal that Russell Crowe might cry? Are you fucking kidding?

***

We are discussing—because as Crowe points out, perfectly reasonably, over and over, how the weight of past stories and opinion, inaccurate and otherwise, might smother any fresh truth about him—a story of how he is supposed to have insulted Moby in the bathroom of an Australian club [20] while he says he was actually in Ecuador at the time:

            "I think possibly there's a self-contained aspect to who I am that bothers people, because by now I should have had at least three or four visits to rehab; I should have probably been up on domestic-abuse charge. Because I'm not really doing the fucking, Russell Crowe brand-name shit. I'm not fulfilling that stuff. So if I don't fulfill, then just write about it anyway… You know, there was an article I was reading on-set somewhere, and there were eleven things on the list that made me a motherfucker, right? The eleven points of motherfuckeringdom of Russell Crowe. And nine of them were completely untrue, had never happened, but had been over time reprinted so much that that they were now folkloric."

But you were two-elevenths a motherfucker?

Yeah. [drily]  Apparently. Yeah. [looks at his watch]  Shit. I didn't realize it was that late. I missed putting Charlie to bed. That's going to really bum me out all night. I'm an idiot. I didn't even look at my watch… It's just a really hard time, between bedtime and when he wakes up in the morning—it's a really long time to wait.

How much does it mean to you, having won an Oscar?

Quite a lot, really. To be honest, when you're younger and cooler, you say those sort of things don't mean anything, but then on the day when they pat you on the back and they say, "Look, mate, we're noticing what you're doing—thanks very much," you think of the people who spent a life in the cinema and didn't receive that kind of accolade, and it's sort of a humbling experience. And it's very nice and all that. But it doesn't change the way I do things.

And in your mind, do you think Gladiator has been your best performance?

No—not at all. Nowhere near it.

What would you put above it?

This is not belittling it, because I do think it's a very emotionally and intellectually complicated physical performance, and it's the combination of those things that made it a little unusual, I suppose. But I definitely rate The Insider and A Beautiful Mind above that. I probably rate Romper Stomper above it. And there's a hell of a lot of nuance going on in L.A. Confidential as well.

In the midst of the Oscar celebrations and the success of Gladiator, there was the rather strange kidnapping subplot. [21] What can you explain about that now?

We just arrived in Los Angeles, and we got contacted by the FBI, and they arrived at the hotel we were staying at, and they went through this elaborate speech, telling us that for the whole time we were going to be in America, they were going to be around and part of life. You know—oh, I shouldn't say things like this—I do wonder if it was some kind of PR thing to attract sympathy toward me, because it seemed very odd. Suddenly, it looks like a I think I'm fucking Elvis Presley, because everywhere I go there are all these FBI guys around.

I don't think it did create sympathy for you. I think a lot of people were kind of mean about it. I think they wrote about it in a way that implied you were paranoid and self-important.

None of it was my application. I didn't pay for any of it. It was… the FBI, bless their pressed white shirts. They picked up on something they thought was really important, and they were following it through. They were fucking serious, mate. What are you supposed to do? You get this late-night call from the FBI when you arrive in Los Angeles, and they're like absolutely full-on. "We've got to talk to you now, before you do anything. We have to have a discussion with you, Mr. Crowe."

But who was supposed to be after you?

[pauses]  Um… well, that was the first conversation in my life that I'd ever heard the phrase Al Qaeda. And it was something to do with some recording picked up by a French policewoman, I think, in either Libya or Algiers. And it was a destabilization plan. I don't think that I was the only person. But it was about—it was about taking iconographic Americans out of the pictures as a sort of cultural-destabilization plan.

So presumably the trigger for it was that you played the iconic American movie role of the year?

That seemed to be a Hollywood thing, yeah. But look, I'll tell you what, it was never resolved to any intellectual satisfaction from my point of view. I never fully understood what the fuck was going on.

But there must have been a point where they said, "Well, we're not going to be around anymore…"

Oh yeah.  There was a point where they said they thought the threat had probably or had possibly been overstated, and then they started to question their sources, and blah, blah, blah. But I don't know how it was resolved, you know? But they were serious about it. [22] And what can you say? I mean, gee, there were a lot of man-hours spent doing that gig, so the least I can say is, "Thank you very much."

It must have messed with your head somewhat.

I think it was a bit odd. But I also thought, [laughs]  Mate, if you want to kidnap me, you'd better bring a mouth gag. I'll be talking you out of the essential philosophies you believe in the first twenty-four hours, son. I might chew through the first one, too, so be prepared.

chris heath is a gq correspondent.