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

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 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?”

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

“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” will go on late into the night as we watch a re-run of a game featuring his beloved South Sydney Rabbitohs rugby league club on DVD over a Chinese takeaway – “I’m bored with room service” – and some beers.

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 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. 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.)

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. Long before the big paydays he would be sending presents from afar for my kids and he still does. He has also donated vast sums to charity and made sure that it never makes the papers. But most of all, he’s funny, a laugh, great crack.

For example, being an Aussie – he was born in New Zealand but has spent more time in Oz – he wants England to lose at everything. Once, in 2003, when we were in his plush suite in Milan, a bellman delivered 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. 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. When England won he paid up, delivering the cash on a silver salver and saying: “It’s your round, son…”

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. One of the actors was Russell Crowe (another was Danielle Spencer who would many years later become his wife).

I met Crowe in a coffee bar near his agent’s office. 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. If he came to the UK he would stay at my home in Brighton.

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, 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, with Crowe recording every obscenity and chant so he could take it all back Down Under with him. It’s all in the preparation.


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, Spyforce, 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.

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?

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.”

I don’t believe that he won’t do it again – I don’t think he can help it – but it’s true that having kids has changed his priorities. These days Crowe is surrounded by his family – that’s non-negotiable – and he’s calmer as a result.

The temper that got him into spectacular trouble in the past – rows at BAFTA and the famous early-morning altercation with the clerk at the Mercer Hotel in New York – and has seen him branded as a hothead has been less evident these past couple of years. 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”
When Crowe was starting out he said lots of things that 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.

Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World and Cinderella Man are available now on Blu-ray Disc™