Four days before the telephone rage incident Russell Crowe is in chatty form, driving around New York in a limo with Sean O'Driscoll. His new film about boxer James Braddock, his Irish roots - and his song about Richard Harris are on the agenda
Russell Crowe lights up a cigarette and looks back at the 30 autograph hunters lined up behind his car. "W**kers," he says. "They're not the real fans, they're just in it for the money. They know exactly what they can get for each photo and poster. I used to be able to ask, 'Who do you want the autograph for?' and if they didn't know a name, then I knew they were full of shit. But now they tell you that they want it signed for 'John'. Later they take out the alcohol rub and take 'John' off the autograph and sell it. I wish they'd just leave me alone. It's ridiculous."
For reasons I still don't fully understand, I am riding in the back of Russell Crowe's limo as he recalls his Limerick drinking tales and shares his love for the late Irish actor Richard Harris.
I had asked for an interview and he had over-ruled his publicist and invited me into his dressing room at a Manhattan TV studio, where he stood half-naked as he discussed his Irish roots (Clare or Cork, he thinks).
Afterwards, he invites me into the limo to hear an Irish track from his album, his first since he split with his band, Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts.
As we veer down Broadway, he says he'd like to play a few other tracks from the album first. "So whack on the album mate, stick on track one," he tells the driver.
What's with the design on his jacket? (He is wearing a dark jacket with a bulldog and a shamrock design.) "Oh, that's something I designed for the crew," he says. The shamrock and bulldog are a tribute to James Braddock, the 1930s heavyweight champion he plays in Cinderella Man.
"Track one, from the beginning, really loud!" he says, puffing on a cigarette and blowing the smoke out the window. The first track is a tribute to the patience of his wife, Danielle Spencer, for enduring his moody personality. The lyrics are pretty timely, as he's arrested four days later for throwing a telephone at a hotel concierge while trying to call Danielle at their Australian home.
"I'm so hard to handle. My life is a suitcase that has never been closed. Don't know how you stand it. Don't know how you love me, God only knows," he sings. He sticks his head out the window as he listens.
His face is hidden behind a baseball cap and dark sunglasses but a woman in a taxi next to us screams in recognition and presses her face to the cab window. We turn a corner and he turns his head back into the car.
He'd like me to hear a track he wrote about Richard Harris and the Irish rugby team, which he hopes will become a terrace anthem for Irish rugby fans.
"Me and Richard were supposed to go to the test match at Lansdowne Road, Australia versus Ireland at the end of 2002 but he died about 10 or 14 days earlier. We kept talking as if he wasn't sick and we were going to go to the game and it would all be cool." Harris's death devastated him, he says. After the funeral, he was supposed to return to Australia, but decided to stay in Ireland and go on a Harris pilgrimage.
He travelled to Harris's native city, Limerick, to try out the Charlie St George's pub, which Harris had talked about many times while he and Crowe filmed Gladiator together. He was somewhat surprised by the decor.
"When Richard talked about it, it was always in such glowing and romantic terms. I was surprised to see that it was kind of a shop front. I was expecting some beautiful carved wood and traditional Irish pub built in the 1600s or something." He had a great time at the pub, he says, and travelled up through counties Clare and Galway for the Australia-Ireland game he was hoping to attend with Harris.
Before the game, he asked then Irish captain Keith Wood if the team would wear black armbands in Harris's honour. "He said that the Irish rugby union didn't do things like that. It was nice to talk to Keith, he's a legend." He sat down to watch the game, expecting Ireland to be trounced. "It wasn't expected to be much of a challenge for Australia. Maybe 20 minutes of rough and tumble up front but then they'd just amass points.
"So I'm standing there at Lansdowne Road and, at first, I'm feeling a little sad because Richard wasn't there but then the game got under way and Australia couldn't do anything right. George Gregan [the Australian captain] dropped the ball, I think, seven times at the base of the scrum.
"The mist came down, everybody was singing The Fields of Athenry and the pressure just built and Australia lost. I couldn't help think from half-time onwards that Richard was on the field, that he was actually there." Crowe throws his arms up, imitating an invisible Richard Harris catching the rugby ball in a line-out.
"I went to a pub after the game and wrote out lyrics on a beer coaster and put it in my pocket." As the limo heads into Soho, he signals to the driver. "Play that song, mate. Nice and loud. Track nine. Nice and loud."
IT IS A surreal scene. We are barrelling down one of the world's trendiest neighbourhoods with the lyrics to his Richard Harris tribute blaring out the window, accompanied by equally loud bodhráns and bagpipes. People are starting to stare.
He taps his finger to the lyrics: "Mr Harris take the field and plays the 16th man. We'll sing of Athenry and you'll do all you can for the green, the glorious green. The emerald green of Ireland's pride." A bicycle courier pulls up beside our car and turns to us, caught by the blaring music. "We'll take the fight, we'll never yield, for Irish sons have Irish hearts and Mr Harris, Mr Harris take the field."
It's clear Crowe wants the song to be heard on the street, and when we stop at a traffic light the car gathers more attention from passers-by. I tell him I think Harris would have been very proud, both of the song and the attention it has brought.
"That's what I thought," says Crowe. "That's why I wrote it, as a galvanising thing for Irish rugby to reach for. Pretty much everything in your culture is steeped in the belief that there is more than you see. So here it is, here's the thing. If you call the rugby gods, maybe you can do it through Richard Harris. You can be assured that the rugby gods and Richard Harris are pretty closely connected." He laughs loudly and takes another drag from his cigarette.
We pull up at the hotel and he gets out. (It's no secret now that it's the Mercer Hotel in lower Manhattan: its name was screamed all over the tabloids after his arrest on Monday.) One of his staff opens the hotel door. From the corner of my eye, I can see the man open and close the door repeatedly as Crowe stands on the sidewalk and talks and talks about rugby and Richard Harris. As a crowd gathers, he stumbles back on the pavement while imitating his trip to the Cliffs of Moher during his Harris tribute journey.
He flounders around and comes back to me. "I was leaning right into the wind, it was fantastic." His eyes are wide and excited, like a young boy talking about a school tour.
I'm beginning to understand Russell Crowe. He likes uncomplicated situations and loves being a man's man. He loves rugby stories and clear-cut song lyrics. A concierge who can't connect him to Australia at 4am is being fussy and complicated and likely to suffer his telephone-flinging fury.
HE SUDDENLY CHANGES the conversation and wants to talk about James Braddock. Cinderella Man is the first film this year to receive a solid nod for next year's Oscars. Crowe is proud of his work, but refuses to meet 60 journalists waiting at round-table interviews the next day because of a tepid review he received from the New York Times.
He has been inspired by the Braddock story since 1997, he says, and spent many years reading up on the subject. "I didn't rely on family members for research," he says. "I just went through newspaper archives and things. He was an amateur boxer when he came to fight (heavyweight legend) Tommy Loughran, who gave him a bit of a boxing lesson so his stock went down and his confidence too." Braddock's tumultuous fortune echoed that of the Depression-era US.
"The big thing for me is that the story stayed relevant because this change of fortune actually happened. Here was a boxer who was building a respectable wealth, he was wasn't wasting his money, he was living very frugally, he had everything invested in stocks and everything he hadn't invested in stocks he put into a bank. So what happened to him in the stock market collapse was horrible and then there's this comeback. It took a long time for me to find people that would see it the way I saw it."
He is delighted the Braddock family have already seen the film. Some 50 of them came to the studio and he was thrilled when they mistook footage from the film with real-life footage of James Braddock fighting.
"Braddock's heavyweight win was a gigantic zeitgeist moment. It was one of the few times when the complete working class fulfils what society needs from him at that moment and he was at 10-to-one odds at the most generous bookies," he says. He has signed many photos for the Braddock family but is wondering how many more he will have to sign. "James's son Ron said to me last night that he wanted another one and I was like: 'God, how many do you need, mate?'"
Crowe's publicist is looking at her watch now; she looks like she is about to kill me but Crowe ignores her. "Do you know what the greatest thing about Braddock was?" he says. "That he re-achieved his normalcy. He didn't go around getting people to call him champion. He finished boxing, he joined the army for a bit, he ran a restaurant for a while, he had various businesses."
He discovered that Braddock was a bad businessman. "He wasn't very good at restaurants in particular, because he couldn't charge people for food, given that he had come from the Depression." He laughs quickly. He seems in very good form.
When he mentions Braddock "re-achieving normalcy" does he see a comparison with his own life, or is he still struggling with stardom? "Well, I think to compare my struggle with Braddock's would be stretching it. Braddock's achievements were amazing and his legacy deserves its own attention and respect." If there is a comparison, he says, it's only in the struggle to live a happy life.
Crowe has his hand pressed to his face, trying to explain what he has learned from Braddock's life. "You see, Braddock died desperately in love with his wife, having seen his children grow up and his grandchildren being born," he says as he prepares to enter the foyer of the hotel.
"I just thought it was a really important American story," he says. "He didn't end up a drug addict or an alcoholic or a restaurant guy in Las Vegas, he just lived his life. It's kind of what I'm struggling to do myself."
Cinderella Man opens in Ireland on Sep 9