Russell Crowe slams ‘absolute rubbish’ Gladiator script – ‘I wanted to get out of there’
It’s been over two decades since Gladiator stormed the box office and won five Oscars including Best Picture and Best Actor for Russell Crowe. As Sir Ridley Scott gears up to start shooting the long-awaited sequel this year, his original star didn’t hold back on what he thought of the first film’s script in a candid new interview.
Speaking with Vanity Fair, Crowe shared: “At the core of what we were doing was a great concept, but the script was rubbish, absolute rubbish. It had all these sort 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, and 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?’ [Chuckles].
“The energy around what we were doing was very fractured. I did think a couple times maybe my best option was just to get on a plane and get out of there.”
gladiators fighting© GETTY
Crowe continued: “It was my continued conversations with Ridley that gave me faith, he said to me at one point in time, ‘Mate, we’re not committing anything to camera you don’t believe in 100 percent.’ So, when we actually started that film, we had 21 pages of script that we agreed on. A script is usually between 103-110 pages or something like that, so we had a long way to go, and we basically used up those pages in the first section of the movie. [Laughs] So, by the time we got to our second location, which was Morocco, we were sort of catching up.”
During production, the unfinished script was complained about for its writing quality by several members of the cast, forcing many rewrites. What made things more complicated was Oliver Reed suffering a fatal heart attack before the production wrapped.
