Sony Magazine Issue #2 - You're a good night in one man by Martin Palmer

(Transcription and images thanks to Rose)

That’s what the late, great Richard Harris said when he first met Russell Crowe. So what’s Crowe really like? Best ask someone who’s been his friend for 18 years. In this Sony Magazine exclusive, Editor-at-Large Martyn Palmer gives his personal insights into the fiercely private Oscar-winner

It’s just after 4pm on a regulation cloudless, sunny day in Los Angeles and Russell Crowe – bearded, hair down to his shoulders and wearing jeans, a rugby shirt and hoodie – is in the passenger’s seat of a gleaming black SUV. He’s trying to work out the best way from Beverly Hills to Downtown. “Mate, maybe take the freeway? What do you reckon?”

Crowe is sitting in the passenger’s seat of a gleaming jet black SUV, the window wound down and a Benson & Hedges fired up with smoke curling outside.

The driver, whose back resembles a large brick wall, mutters a deferential, “Yes, sir, that could be the best.”

His passenger is bearded with hair hanging down to his shoulders and is wearing blue jean, a rugby shirt and a hoodie emblazoned with the name of his beloved Souths Sydney Rabbitohs rugby league club. He takes a sideways glance at Mr. Driver with a little chuckle.

“Don’t worry about the ‘sir’ mate. Just ‘Russell’ will do.”

Back in his hotel suite a couple of hours later, we enter a room set up as his office. Our “little chat” ,as he calls it, will go on late into the night as we watch a re-run of a game featuring the Rabbitohs on DVD over a Chinese takeaway – “I’m bored with room service” – and some beers.
The desk is piles high with scripts he hasn’t read yet:”If you fancy reading a couple let me know if they are any good.”
 
There will be interruptions to our evening – he goes off to read his boys a bedtime story and takes a couple of calls, one from Christian Bale with the opening line: “Hey Batman, how’s it going?” Batman has a five-minute chat with Gladiator, which mostly involves trying to pin down when they can meet up for a drink.

The odd couple

From the outside, ours is a strange friendship. A poacher and a gamekeeper, a fox and a hound: Russell Crowe, a Hollywood superstar with a reputation for chewing up journalists, and spitting them across the room ,and a writer. How does that work?

Well, from the inside it works just perfectly, thanks. We share the same interests – music, movies and sport. We can talk late into the night about the merits of Johnny Cash and Billy Bragg and whether John was better than Paul. I’ve listened to him sing a song he’s just written and I’ve seen his band play countless times. Both of us have been known to drink too many beers. When I’ve got into trouble as a result, it doesn’t make the newspapers; when he does it, sometimes it does.

He knows my team – Bristol City – and I know his, the Souths, who won 20 championships in the past before they fell on hard times. The difference is, he co-owns the team he supported as a boy while I log on to the Robins’ website to check on their progress and occasionally get to an away game.

“I was five when I first saw them [the Souths]” Crowe recalls. “My dad took me along with a mate of his and the first match was Souths versus Saint George. We lost. Dad was a cheap bastard and got these tickets on the Hill, which was the rough section of the ground. I remember a point in the game where a decision went against us and the beer cans started flying and I was thinking: ‘What are we doing here?’ But I was hooked.”

Since taking them over almost two years ago, Crowe and co-owner Peter Holmes à Court have completely completely re-organised the Souths, banning cheerleaders and making the club-house more family friendly. A new coach and new players have been brought in and Crowe has even designed a range of new Rabbitohs merchandise himself.

Crowe takes nothing from it. All the profits are ploughed back in. He just wants to see the Souths win. It’s already making a difference. Last year they finished seventh and made the playoffs for the Grand Final.

“What’s it like owning a club you supported as a boy?” “It’s incredible. But it’s quite a tiring experience too. People say that we run it too emotionally, that we are too passionate about it. Is there such a thing? Can you be too passionate about the future of your players, their life during rugby, their life after rugby?”

Russell Crowe is an Aussie – he was born in New Zealand but has spent more time in Oz –and I’m a Brit.  He wants England to lose at everything. I want them to win everything but at the very least beat the Aussies. Once, in 2003, when we were in his plush suite in Milan, where he had some close family and friends over for a drink, he arranged for the bellman to deliver a note addressed to me. I feared the worst. Who could possibly want to get hold of me in this way?

The room was hushed as I opened the envelope. The note simply read “3-1”, a reference to the score that Australia had beaten England by in that week’s football friendly. It took a long time to live that one down.

We’ve bet on all sorts of games over the years. The 2003 Rugby World Cup – England won. I was ecstatic and in a moment of weakness I agreed to gamble the whole, in my terms substantial, of my winnings on a double or quits on the next Ashes series. We won that too and he paid up, delivering the cash on a silver salver and saying: “It’s your round, son…”

That was a good night as I recall.

We communicate via email during the long months when we don’t meet up. He will check in, from wherever he is in the world. They are usually humdrum, matey exchanges about mutual friends, football, rugby, music and occasionally work.

In the beginning…

It all started back in 1990. I was in Sydney doing some interviews and a PR asked me if I’d be interested in talking to three young actors who had just made a small budget film, a rather good little drama called The Crossing.

Why not? t could be useful if the film was released in the UK (it never was). One of the actors was Russell Crowe (another was Danielle Spencer who would many years later become his wife)and the other was Bobby Mammone who has stayed a friend to us both.

I met Crowe in a coffee bar near his agent’s office in Sydney. He was articulate, fiercely bright, cocky, passionate, enthusiastic and funny. He still is. He asked if I fancied a drink after he’d finished work that night – he was playing a Geordie in a play about World War 1 – and we ended up in some dodgy bars until seven in the morning.

I came back to the UK but we kept in touch. I visited Australia frequently, once staying with Crowe in his grungy two-bedroom apartment that was also home to cockroaches the size of cats. On one occasion, after a particularly heavy week-end, it took us an entire morning to clear the empties so that we could reach the kitchen sink.

In the early days of Crowe’s career, if he came to the UK he would come and stay at my home and we’d walk the streets of Brighton without a soul bothering us.

When he was preparing to play a skinhead in Romper Stomper – a key calling card for Hollywood – he wanted to meet real skinheads and to go to Wrexham where one side of his family originally came from. We got as far as Cardiff where we drank in a rough boozer near Splott, full of tattooed heavies – skinheads in all but name. He struck up a conversation with a couple of Neanderthals, drawing them out until they were spouting some spectacularly nasty racist garbage, and it was only later that I found out he’d been taping them.

We went back to Brighton to watch Brighton & Hove Albion in a play-off against Millwall. The match was ugly, the crowd uglier and to Crowe’s delight there was a pitch invasion. We stood in the middle of the Brighton fans celebrating their 4-1 win, with Crowe grinning like he’d just scored the winner, waving a tape machine recording every obscenity and chant so he could take it all back Down Under with him. It’s all in the preparation, you see.

Given the intensity of his personality, it’s not surprising that Crowe relished the role of a bad guy. In fact, the only surprising thing is that he hasn’t played more of them. Notoriously there was the skinhead in Romper Stomper, the cyber villain in Virtuosity, the psychotic cowboy in 3:10 to Yuma and the Machiavellian CIA boss in the forthcoming Body of Lies.

“I like villains”, says Crowe, “because there’s something so attractive about a committed person.”

We’ve had a drink in 21 different cities, but who’s counting? Well, I am, actually. There are at least three that I can’t remember- Chicago, where his band was playing at the House of Blues, is  a bit fuzzy for instance. In Berlin he was told that he’d just received his third Oscar nomination, for A Beautiful Mind. I’ll never forget the sight of director Ron Howard, a placid, likable American not renowned for hell-raising, coaxed up onto the bar in Berlin’s only Aussie pub where he danced a jig, with Crowe yelling: “Go for it Richie!” so nicknamed after Howard’s part as Richie Cunningham in Happy Days, then:” On second thoughts, get down- you’re a great director but you can’t dance for shit !”

Family ties

Crowe’s parents, Alex and Jocelyn, were publicans and occasionally location caterers. He can remember being on film sets as a boy and had a small part in a TV show, Spy force, when he was just seven. As a teenager he played in bands and earned cash as a DJ at a bar in Auckland.

He was sport-mad too, and comes from a family of high achievers – his cousins, Martin and Jeff Crowe, both played cricket for New Zealand. He’s a good cricketer – an all rounder – and plays rugby, both codes, with the kind of fire and commitment you might expect. I know because the bastard has hit me hard with a couple of tackles.

A few weeks later after LA I get a call to tell me that Crowe’s on his way to London. We meet for a drink in the Dorchester and watch rugby union on the telly in his room. England beat the French and it’s a good start to the evening as far as I’m concerned, but he’s constantly shouting “Come on Les Bleus !” at the TV, which tends to get in the way of the commentary.

Then we go for dinner with his wife Danielle and some of her relatives from Yorkshire along with my wife and kids. Despite the pain of seeing England’s triumph (I foolishly refused a bet), Crowe’s in fine form at the head of the table for 20 in a private room downstairs. It’s easy company, a lot of laughs, and when the kids have gone to bed a nightcap in his room.

These days, Crowe is a very rich man with a farm near Coffs Harbour, where his parents and older brother, Terry, live full-time, and a beautiful harbourside apartment in Sydney. The contrast between his life now and the way that he grew up couldn’t be greater.

He worries about how his boys (Charlie, four, and Tennyson, two) will cope with being the sons of a very famous father. At the moment, they’re too young to know that Dad is an Oscar winner.

“‘Daddy makes DVDs but they’re not good enough for Charlie to watch’ – that’s the way he sees it,” says Crowe. “How I keep them grounded is a good question and it’s something I’m going to be dealing with for the rest of my life. That’s the big gig, being a dad.”

A changed man?

When Gladiator turned Crowe into a superstar, it all changed. At least for a while, it hit him, and all of us who knew him, like a tsunami. I had the tabloids ringing up asking if I knew who he was sleeping with, whether he was going to be the new James  Bond, if it was true he was in a strip club in Hong Kong three weeks ago last Wednesday. The answer was, and always is, the same: “No comment”.

Over the years, I’ve written about him many, many times. It’s never easy. But we have one unspoken rule. When the tape recorder is on, it’s fair game. When it’s turned off and whatever he might say about, for example, another famous actor or director or whoever, stays between us. Does that compromise my position? Yes and no. Most Hollywood interviews are strictly regimented in a plush hotel where you are supposed to form an opinion based on the briefest of brief of encounters. At least, with Russ, I do feel as though I know the man.
 
What’s he like? Well, he’s loyal, charming and he’s engaging and at times abrasive bordering on the rude. He’s also ludicrously generous and always has been, even back when he didn’t have two Aussie dollars to rub together. Long before the big paydays he would be sending presents from afar for my kids and he still does. He has also, to my knowledge, donated vast sums to charity and made sure that it never makes the papers and he will be embarrassed that I even mentioned it. But there’s far more to him than a few headlines.

He’s all of the above but most of all, he’s funny, a laugh, great crack. And sometimes that gets him into trouble. Once, I saw into an interview room where a small group of European journalists awaited him.

“Does anybody mind if I smoke?” he asked. “Well, actually, yes, I do”, piped a German scribe. “Well you’d better leave then…” he quipped back. Off duty, Crowe’s happiest in casual- he has a vast array of sports tops and fleeces, all of which he designed himself, from virtually every film he’s worked on in the last 10 years. Each an every member of the cast and crew has one too, from the director down to the runners. “It’s a good way of making everyone feel part of a team, a good way of bonding”, he explains. “It’s a small thing but I do like it.”

The small thing probably costs him thousands and most other actors of his status wouldn’t even think about it. With Crowe, everything is in the detail. And the detail has to be right. If it’s worth doing, you do it to the absolute, no half measures, whether it’s organizing a dinner for friends, running the South Sydney Rabbitohs or researching a role. It’s all about the preparation and the execution.

Sometimes a character will open up to him because of some small details. With Richie Roberts in American Gangster- a real detective who he met and invited to his house so he could get to know him- it was a Star of David necklace, with John Nash, the troubled Nobel laureate in A Beautiful Mind, it was long fingernails.

Some might say that this borders on obsession. Crowe doesn’t agree. “No, I don’t. When people talk to me about preparation they are usually expecting me to come out with some wacky stuff. But I’m just doing what’s required because I respect the job. Maybe 95 per cent of actors don’t put that preparation in. Who cares? I don’t care what they do. I don’t know how any actor could go into a movie like American Gangster, for instance, and not want to spend time with the person they are playing. I don’t have that level of arrogance to believe that I could pull it off without thinking about it.”

Recently he’s been working with Leonardo Di Caprio on Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies, a political thriller due to be released later this year. They worked together before, in 1995, on Sam Raimi’ s offbeat western The Quick and The Dead. “Yes, Leo was a virgin then…”

The physical transformation that Crowe has undertaken in the past – piling on the pounds to play a portly man almost 20 years his senior in The Insider (a startling performance that earned him his first Academy nod), taking them back off for Gladiator, pushing that same body as hard as he’s ever done to ‘honour’ boxer Jim Braddock in Cinderella Man – has taken its toll. A shoulder injury required surgery and delayed filming; another heavy knock meant he missed one film altogether.

“I look back on some of the schedules for some of the movies that I’ve done, like A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man, and I can’t imagine myself voluntarily going on to those 20-week-plus shoots ever again in my life. Something’s clicked. It’s changed.

“I think it’s a big sandwich of things but part of it is definitely to do with family and not requiring from the job the love and affection or whatever that I now have with my family.”

He has taken some hard knocks and has put his body on the lines enough times. But I don’t believe that he won’t do it again – I don’t think he can help it – yet it’s true that having kids has changed his priorities. Crowe is surrounded by his family which these days is a must, non-negotiable – and he’s calmer as a result.

The temper that got him into spectacular trouble in the past and has seen him branded as a hothead has been less evident these past couples of years. There have been rows at BAFTA and the famous early-morning altercation at the Mercer Hotel in New York in May 2005 where he threw a telephone at night clerk Nestor Estrada, nicking his cheek. Somewhat ruefully he notes: “My bottom is covered in bruises of my own comedy coming back to bite me on the arse. It’s ridiculous.”

“This gig’s a calling”

We go for a walk through Hyde Park. Crowe’s pushing Charlie and I’m struggling to keep up. He wants to show me Charlie’s favourite statue, peter Pan, in Kensington Gardens, and I’m battling with a persistent headache lodged right behind my eyes. He, on the other hand, seems full of beans. The baseball cap is pulled down and he’s still got that bearded, grizzly look.

Most people do a double take and by the time they realize it’s Russell Crowe, he’s gone striding on by. It’s only when we stop at the statue that the onlookers close in, taking snaps of him on their mobile phones. Word that he’s there ripples around the Sunday morning crowd like a breeze.

A couple of minutes later, we’re gone again- heading back to a café where we can sit in a corner and hopefully go un-noticed. Some chance. Time was we could drink in pubs and bars all around and nobody would pay any attention. These days Crowe is constantly asked for autographs and to pose for pictures, which, despite his reputation, he usually does quite happily. For those that get him, there are few characters more beguiling. He’s gathered plenty of friends along the way- Ridley Scott (with whom he’s made four films now) is one of his mentors as well as being a mate. He clearly rates Christian Bale as an actor and a man.
The late, great Richard Harris was another friend. They met on Gladiator and instantly recognised a fellow traveler in each other- a shared passion for rugby, a decent pint and a commitment to the cause of acting. He respected Harris, most of all, and still misses him

”I miss him especially when I go to England. Because I’d invariably ring him up at The Savoy (Hotel where Harris kept a suite) or maybe go to the bar there and just call his room. I was extraordinarily lucky with Richard. I would be able to find him in London because I knew his haunts. Even though it’s a big city there were specific places that he liked to go. I’m not sure if it was really driven by me or by him. On the first night I met him, he said:’Crowe, is it true you were born in New-Zealand but choose to live in Australia? Right, right. So I can talk to you in hushed and reverent tones about the All Blacks, and I can yell abuse at you about the bloody Wallabies! I think I’m going to like you, Crowe!’”

When Crowe was starting out he said lots of things that people- usually journalists - frequently remind him about now that he’s rich and famous. “Once, when I was earning about 26 cents a movie, someone asked, ‘What would you do if you were earning $10 million a movie?’ And I went, ‘Retire. Go home, pay the bills, look after Mum and Dad and say goodbye to work.’

“But of course the reality of the thing is that you are not in this business for the bucks anyway. And I know that will come across as being incredibly pretentious and something that people will assassinate me for, but this gig’s a calling, man, especially for people that do it in a public way for more than four or five years.

“You know, you put up with all the crap that comes with this job and you have to love it at its core.
And I dig it, man; I think it’s a privilege making films. It’s the most expensive, creative medium on the planet and it is a privilege for me to do it. I give it my best and I don’t have any problems whatsoever in standing up in front of a group of people and saying, ‘I take making movies seriously and if you don’t then golly, you obviously won’t like my movies.’ That’s about it, really.”

And it is. That’s about it. He knows where he is going, you see.

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