Russell Crowe considered leaving Gladiator over 'absolute rubbish' early script

Russell Crowe initially gave a thumbs down to Ridley Scott's 2000 epic Gladiator, the film that would go on to score the star his first and only Best Actor trophy at the Oscars.

The 59-year-old New Zealand-born performer said that he was unimpressed with the initial story for the global box office smash, in which he starred as Maximus Decimus Meridius, who, after his family is murdered, battles his way to revenge against Joaquin Phoenix's maniacal Commodus.

"I was confident about my abilities as a leading man. What I wasn't confident about with Gladiator was the world that was surrounding me. At the core of what we were doing was a great concept, but the script, it was rubbish. Absolute rubbish," Crowe told Vanity Fair in the video interview below. "It had all these sort of strange sequences, and one of them was about chariots and famous gladiators [who] use certain types of chariots, and some famous gladiators had endorsement deals with products 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 go, 'What the f--- is all this?' The energy around what we were doing was very fractured. I did think, a couple times, maybe my best option is just to get on a plane and get out of here, you know?"

Crowe said that it was "continued conversations with Ridley" that gave him "faith" to continue filming the project.

"He said to me at some point in time, 'We're not committing anything to camera that you don't believe in, 100 percent. So, when we actually started that film, we had 21 pages of the script that we agreed on," he continued. "A script is usually between 103 or 104, 110 pages, 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. So, by the time we got to our second location, which was Morocco, we were sort of catching up."

DreamWorks/Courtesy Everett Collection Russell Crowe in 'Gladiator'

Scott is currently working on a sequel starring Denzel Washington, Barry Keoghan, and Aftersun Oscar nominee Paul Mescal as Lucius, the son of Connie Nielsen's Lucilla who appeared as a child (played by Spencer Treat Clark) in the first film. As of now, it's slated for a November 2024 release.

"The only thing that I really feel about it is slightly jealous, you know?" Crowe told Collider of the sequel in April. "Because I was a much younger man, obviously, and it was a huge experience in my life. It's something that changed my life, really. It changed the way people regarded me and what I do for a living."

Watch Crowe discuss making the original film in the video above.

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