He's all gruff, down-home blokeishness on the outside, but in his latest film, the Oscar-nominated A Beautiful Mind, New Zealander Russell Crowe lays a more introverted Nobel-prize winning mathematical genius. A great actor? Maybe; but maths is not his forte, he tells Donald Clarke
'There will be no personal questions. If any are asked, they will be ignored and we will move on to the next person." The PR panjandrum does not add that any offending hacks will be dragged out into the street and nailed to a lamppost, but I take it as read.
We've just seen A Beautiful Mind, an efficient piece of Oscar bait that relates the inspiring - what else? - true story of mathematician John Nash and his struggles with schizophrenia. It has long been a cliche that the quickest way to an Academy Award is to grab any part that allows you to play disabled: blind (see Scent of a Woman) will do, paralysed (Coming Home) is better, but faking mental problems absolutely guarantees statuettes (Shine, Rain Man). And true to form on Tuesday, when this year's nominations were announced, Russell Crowe's performance as the Princeton-based Nobel laureate got the expected nod. (As indeed did Sean Penn for his role as a mentally challenged single dad in I Am Sam.) A Beautiful Mind is also nominated in a further seven categories including best film.
The dictum about personal questions does not relate to his fellow nominees, director Ron Howard or screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, both of whom are present at this press conference in London. One assumes it is to protect Crowe from queries about his much publicised relationship with Meg Ryan, his première-league swearing or perhaps his height.
As far as the last question goes, the actor is no giant, but rumours that he is Cruiseishly tiny are wide of the mark. With his thick mass of facial hair and his inexpertly-ironed shirt, the New Zealander, consciously or not, manages to convey a gruff, down-home blokeishness. That lack of polish has allowed him to convincingly inhabit two quite distinct personae: the aggressive, shouty Crowe of Gladiator (2000) or L.A. Confidential (1997) and the contained, introverted victims he plays in A Beautiful Mind or tobacco industry exposé The Insider (1999).
"Well, I wouldn't class them that way," Crowe says. "Gladiator is just as credible a journey as The Insider or A Beautiful Mind. I approach every character with the same level of focus. Maybe you want to ask me another question, because I just don't see it that way." Sadly, this is as close as we get to seeing the legendary Crowe temper. The journalist who asked the question swallows nervously and suggests that the first class of performance requires more physical input. "Yeh. But they both require the same amount of effort. I have always picked roles on the basis of the script. I would never want to limit myself. I read through all these scripts, hundreds, I really have lost count. But every so often I find myself subconsciously playing the part in my head. It's what I call the goosebump factor. And long before I get to the last page I know this is what I am going to do. There were devices built into this script which rocked me on the reading. That doesn't happen too often. But if you don't believe in the script it's very hard to keep getting up at four in the morning."
Once on board Crowe is known to become engulfed in his performance, to a degree that would not shame Robert De Niro: he says he suffered nightmares during this shoot. Yet much of his research into schizophrenia was done by just sticking his head outside his New York apartment.
"I made a comment to The New York Times that was wrongly taken as a glib, smart-alec quip that my research was done by taking a walk round the streets of New York. But just look at the amount of people that are on the street who should be in hospital care but aren't because of the cost. You realise that that guy you saw having a conversation with six imaginary people is going through exactly what we are trying to represent here. If we can get across anything in this film I hope it would be that schizophrenia is not about split personality, it is about different planes of reason."
While the film has received praise for its depiction of Nash's condition, there has been a great deal of controversy about the liberties taken with his life story. The mathematician's illness led to a career hiatus from the early 1950s up to 1994, when he won his Nobel prize for Economics. This being a Ron Howard film - the man behind Apollo 13 and Cocoon - the mood is Oprah-positive. There is no mention of Nash's flirtation with homosexuality, his illegitimate child or his divorce and remarriage: in the movie Jennifer Connelly's Alicia Nash stays by her husband's side throughout. Writer Akiva Goldsman says he was not trying to write a biopic: "How can you tell the story of a life in anything other than a life." Which clarifies what it isn't, if not what it is.
But what is more worrying is the total failure to engage with the mathematics. Imagine Shine with no music. At the mention of the subject, the three men giggle childishly. "In the third year of High School I had a Hungarian algebra teacher," Crowe says. "I was never really able to catch-up after his broken explanations. I used to do my English reading during math. But I didn't need that information here. It's called acting.
"We had Dave Bayer - pretty much insane himself - a math professor at Columbia. And he was able to explain things. But sometimes you'd ask him, he'd answer and you would just have no fucking idea what he was talking about." And everybody screams in agreement. One can't help but think that these cultured men would not brag about their ignorance of literature or history. The sciences are seen as the preserve of the dull, the mad and the eccentric. Hence the conspicuous lack of hard sums in A Beautiful Mind.
Crowe kept his distance from Nash himself during the shoot. "The challenge was how to deduce him as a young man, without any footage of him," he explains. "When you apply 35 years of hospitalisation and medication, what parts of what you see now were really present all those years ago? If I had zeroed in on the person I would have got a lot of stuff that he had processed, thought through and now saw in a different light. So I elected not to meet him. But I got Ron to video him answering certain questions. I reckon that somebody not playing the character would get different answers.
"But he did visit the set quite early on and I ended up using that conversation much later. I asked him if he wanted a cup of tea and he gave me such a complicated answer. Then later on I ad-libbed it into a scene. But there was no way we could exactly replicate the man."
Crowe undergoes a rigorous make-up job in the later stages of the film as his character ages. His appearance must have been a shock when he caught himself in the mirror. "No, not really," he says. "We were lucky in that we got the same make-up guy who did The Insider. Which reminded me that my dad looked really like Jeffrey Wigand [the tobacco executive played by Crowe]. At the première, all these guys were running up to him trying to take his photograph. Now, my Dad's just a bloke. So after about the fourth guy he shouts, 'Fuck off! I'm not him!'.
"But I did go for a walk in this make-up. I put my little raincoat on and shuffled off down to Starbuck's to get a coffee. So the first 15 or 20 people treated me like an older bloke, got out of my way a bit quicker, gave me that respect you offer an older person. Then this one little smart arse walked past and said, 'G'Day, Russell'. Little fucker!"
Excellent! You wouldn't get this sort of swearing from Tom Hanks. One suspects that his reputation for boorishness may just be a result of the confusion hyper-polite Californians experience when encountering a more fecund vocabulary.
It's hard to imagine, say, Val Kilmer worrying about the extras as Crowe did when they were filming Nash's Nobel acceptance speech.
As he explains: "We know we have hundreds of extras there who are going to be there for hour after hour. I know what it's like because I've done that job in my career. They don't see the detail of what we're doing up there. So between delivering the speeches I would do a bit of stand-up: 80-year-old stand-up, perhaps. It keeps them all personally involved as well. Whether we are in an interior, or whatever, we try and involve everybody. We try to make sure that all the corners of the canvas are covered."
That sort of banter continues with the ladies and gentlemen of the press during the conference. By an amusing quirk it transpires that Crowe has not seen the film yet. What's been cut? A verbal tussle breaks out between Crowe and Howard - a Celebrity Death Match between Gladiator's Maximus and Happy Days' Richie Cunningham. "This is our first routine," Crowe laughs. "But we're going to build on it - Ron and Rusty on the road: a routine for the people."
Are we not entertained? I suppose we are.
Beautiful Mind opens on March 1st