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27th August 2023
03:07pm BST
Russell Crowe had admitted that he considered walking away from his role in Gladiator as he thought the film was going to be "absolute rubbish".
Crowe starred as the infamous Maximus Decimus Meridius in the 2000 film but things could've been different had he gone through with his initial thoughts.
Speaking to Vanity Fair in April, he said: "At the core of what we were doing was a great concept, but the script, it was rubbish, absolute rubbish. It had all these sort of strange sequences.
"One of them was about chariots and how famous gladiators used certain types of chariots and some famous gladiators had endorsement deals with products for olive oil and things like that, and that’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 maybe a couple of times, maybe my best option is to just get on a plane and get out of here."
The actor went on to win an Oscar for his excellent performance and explained that a conversation with director Ridley Scott made him want to stay.
"He said to me at one point in time, ‘Mate, we’re not committing anything to camera that you don’t believe in, 100%.’ So when we actually started that film, we had 21 pages of script that we agreed on," Crowe added.
"A script is usually between 103 or four or 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."
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