20 Things You Didn’t Know About Gladiator
7. So Was Richard Harris
Mind you, Sir Richard Harris - playing the Emperor Marcus Aurelius - wasn’t exactly the easiest of people to deal with at times - and he’d been off the hard stuff for a long time, famously only indulging in Guinness in later life.
Much like Oliver Reed, when you hire a legendary hellraising actor like Harris - even in his twilight years - you have to expect to be screwed with a little, and you have to expect that he won’t be messed around.
The lack of a locked shooting script might have given Russell Crowe conniptions, but Harris dealt with it in a fairly straightforward manner: since he couldn’t be bothered to have to learn new lines all over again at the last minute, he would generally completely ignore any freshly rewritten scenes.