Russell Crowe almost quit 'Gladiator' because the script was 'absolute rubbish'

foxnews.com:

Can you imagine the iconic drama "Gladiator" without Russell Crowe? It was in the realm of possibility, according to Crowe himself, who admitted he almost left the project for a multitude of reasons. "‘Gladiator's' my 20-something movie.

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," he told Vanity Fair.  "At the core of what we were doing was a great concept, but the script, it was rubbish.

Absolute rubbish. And it had all these sort of strange sequences, you know. One of them, was about chariots," he shared. While all the storylines were factual, Crowe worried that nothing would resonate with viewers. "It's just not gonna ring right to a modern audience.They're gonna go, ‘What the f--- is all this?’" "The energy around what we were doing was very fractured," he said of the film set. "I did think a couple of times, ‘Maybe my best option is just to get on a plane and get out of here.'" Conversations Crowe had with the film's director, Ridley Scott, contributed to the actor's decision to stay.

Crowe recalled Scott telling him, "Mate, we're not committing anything to camera that you don't believe in 100%." "When we actually started that film, we had 21 pages of script that we agreed on," Crowe shared. "So we had a long way to go, and you know 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." Although Crowe was in his mid-30s and relatively established at the time of filming, he resonated with co-star Joaquin Phoenix, who was just 26. "Joaquin was going through the same thing that I was," Crowe recalled.