Russell Crowe has revealed in a new interview/video with Vanity Fair that he almost didn’t end up playing The Gladiator in Ridley Scott’s historical epic because the original script seemed weird to him.

“I was confident in my ability as a leadoff hitter,” Crowe said. “What I wasn’t sure about with ‘The Gladiator’ was the world around me. The core of what we did was a great idea, but the script, it was rubbish, absolute rubbish.”

Crowe recalled that the original script included scenes of gladiators riding in chariots with product placement, which he believed would confuse the audience. In fact, he revealed that he was ready to leave the shooting but it was the constant discussions with the director that kept him going.

“He said to me at one point, ‘dude, we don’t capture anything on camera that you don’t believe 100%.’ So when we actually started shooting the movie, we had 21 pages of script that we agreed on. A screenplay is usually between 103 or 110 pages.

So we had a long way to go and we basically ran out of those pages in the first section of the movie. So when we got to the second filming location, which was Morocco, we were kind of ahead of schedule [να συμπληρώσουμε το σενάριο]».