20 Things You Didn’t Know About Gladiator
14. Crowe Was Marmite Even Back Then
Russell Crowe’s relationship with Scott extended beyond Gladiator - they’ve made several movies together since, and the director has nothing but warm words for his frequent collaborator.
He became good friends with the late Sir Richard Harris during filming, too - appropriate, considering the father-son relationship that Marcus Aurelius had developed with his favourite general.
However, Crowe has long been notorious for being that odd mixture of pretentious artist and unpretentious Aussie farmer: that, combined with a certain prickly attitude and his infamous bluntness has made him Marmite for an awful lot of the people that he’s encountered over the years.
Even the normally agreeable George Clooney is dismissive of him, after Crowe made reference to Clooney having ‘sold out’ because of his Nespresso commercials. Crowe’s half-hearted apology involved sending the Cloonfather a CD of his band and a book of his poems and claiming he’d been misquoted.
The late Oliver Reed was another such individual. The famously irascible thespian took an instant dislike to Crowe, and at one point even threatened to fight him during a confrontation on set. Again though, this antagonistic relationship worked in Scott’s favour - after all, Proximo and Maximus were at loggerheads in the beginning too.