Malaika Aman
Russel Crowe is best known for his role as Maximus Decimus Meridius in the infamous film Gladiator. But would you believe that this almost didn’t happen because Russel despised the script? Yes, his Oscar-winning performance was based on a script he thought was garbage, with strange sequences that made no sense. The film was about his character’s vengeance for the murder of his son and wife, but here’s what he had to say about the script.
At the core of what we were doing was a great concept, but the script was rubbish, absolute rubbish. It had all these sorts of strange sequences.
One of them was about chariots and how famous gladiators — and this is all true — used certain types of chariots and how famous gladiators had endorsement deals for olive oil and things like that.
It’s all true, but it’s just not going to ring right to a modern audience, they’re going to, ‘What the f*** is all this?’
Russel Crowe
Russel Crowe wanted to “get on a plane and get out.”
Yes, the film he’s referring to is the one that won five Academy Awards and went on to become a classic in many people’s eyes. According to him, his energy was fractured while he was filming, but Ridley Scott was the one who helped him and restored his faith in the film. However, things were not easy, and only 21 of the usual 100+ pages of script were approved by Russel Crowe.
So, only a week before production began, the script went through major rewrites, and the rest is history. Russel Crowe also had a big say in how the ending was structured, and it was completely changed because Russel wanted the character to die honourably, which was the only thing that made sense in his mind.
Yeah, what does Maximus do? Does he end up running a f***king pizzeria by the Colosseum?
Russel Crowe