Word: actors
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...says, "I'm sure regardless of my marriage and impending fatherhood, certain things shift just because of age." One of those things is that he no longer goes out to bars simply to prove that he is not too famous to go out to bars. "I am a famous actor," he says with the grim acceptance of a recovering addict...
Crowe has been working as an actor since age 6, when his father, a hotel manager and film-set caterer, got him a job on a TV show. "I didn't work continuously when I was a young fella, just little bits and pieces," he says, "enough to formulate the desire. And I was never a child star, just a child extra, so I was learning and observing without pressure." After school, Crowe wanted to attend college to study history. But his father was out of work, so instead he hit the market and got jobs in repertory productions...
Crowe is not a Method actor ("I work between 'Action!' and 'Cut!'"), but he does take his preparatory obsessiveness to the set. On the first day of Master and Commander, he handed out three shirts to each cast member and ordered them to return in 24 hours with name tags sewn on them as a way of getting them used to taking orders from him. "It was kind of done with a wink," says co-star Billy Boyd, who plays a coxswain. "Kind of not, too." Crowe says he does this kind of thing a lot and that...
Recognizing that he has to give up something about himself, Crowe sometimes offers a true, if somewhat diversionary, narrative: Russell Crowe, simple bloke. Asked what advice he would give to an actor playing him, he says, "I'd tell them to get another job. It wouldn't be worth doing. I'm very boring." It must be said that Crowe's normal-guy credentials are impeccable. He loves rugby, throwing back a pint and working on his 800-acre farm near Coffs Harbor, six hours north of Sydney. He also loves playing with his band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts...
...real Russell Crowe is not quite Aubrey, the unambiguously heroic fellow he plays in Peter Weir's splendidly bracing sea epic Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Sometimes, the actor comes off as a brute, a primitive: Crowe Magnon Man. So we gladly cede to others the honor of carousing or canoodling with him. We might lock up our daughters at his approach. We would not care to be within striking distance of his coiled wrath...