Russell Crowe has a song about that (2024)

This winter, while filming in Budapest, Russell Crowe cycled to work. Every day he’d ride a thick-tyred mountain bike from his rental house to the studio, deliberately taking the hardest route. He’d log his time on social media, trying to beat his record, usually somewhere around 45 minutes: “You’ve gotta be absolutely prepared to get on the bike and just go.” The route has an elevation of 166 metres, and the hardest path is through a dump. When it rains, the water slips through the rubbish and makes a river of bin juice that the wheels of Crowe’s bike would flick up into his mouth. A new mudguard took care of the worst of it, but there have been days when he has arrived at the make-up trailer covered in Budapestian waste. He says he does this to clear his head.

There’s one point in the journey that makes it all worth it: when the gradient changes, and there’s a long downhill stretch. “It’s just so fantastic when you’ve been riding, riding, riding, getting up to that point, and you get to shooom.”

The house itself could be in LA; its bland, brutalist frontage and shiny interior are at odds with the more traditional buildings on the street, including the café on the corner where we met earlier, run by old Hungarian women selling cakes and ice cream. The grass within its garden walls is so perfect it could be plastic. The topiary is shaped like butt plugs for some reason. “I’ve been describing it as an Eastern European drug dealer’s bordello,” Crowe laughs, apologising for the place as he invites me in. “I don’t know if that’s accurate.”

This is where Crowe has been staying during production of Nuremberg, in which he plays the Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring. It’s the tail end of a hectic period of acting for him, with five films out this year, including The Exorcism, Sleeping Dogs and Sony’s forthcoming supervillain flick Kraven the Hunter. Soon, he’ll be returning to his farm in rural Australia – to his family and his 220 cows – before embarking on a European tour with his band, Indoor Garden Party, this summer. (They’re playing Glastonbury.)

The eyes that drew you into the interior life of an Australian skinhead or a Roman gladiator are still pretty, but he has a new, worn cragginess. I ask how he felt to see his entire face for the first time since 2019, when he shaved only weeks ago to play Göring. “Have you ever seen one of those documentaries where James Cameron takes a camera down to the Mariana Trench and you see these really weird-looking fish? It was kind of like that,” he says. “Took a number of days for my puckered skin to f*cking come back to looking human.”

GQ: How do you feel about turning 60 next week?

Russell Crowe: I can’t believe it. I’m certainly not there with my head. But I do carry a lot of injuries. Over time you start to feel it.

Like what?

I’ve got no cartilage in my big toes because the sports that I played were all lateral movement sports – tennis, rugby and cricket, where you’re sprinting from a cold start – on top of the fight sequences, where sometimes you’ve got to make a very extreme sudden move to save yourself in a situation where something’s gone wrong. [He takes a big breath and starts listing injuries until he runs out of fingers.] I’ve got heel fasciitis. I’ve got shin splints. I’ve got bone-marrow edemas under both knees. I’ve got all manner of things going on with my back. I’ve got ribs that just pop off the spine if I put them under too much pressure. I’ve had two operations on my left shoulder, but now that shoulder is so full of arthritis that for me to get back to a place of comfort, they’ve basically gotta cut in, take the the whole humeral head out, they’ve gotta chop it in half, stick carbon fibre in there and sew it back up, and there’s a recovery period of 11 months. f*ck off. [Laughs.]

Every one of these things relates to something that went wrong on a film set. I’ve only got one scar on my body that isn’t related to film. I jumped over a fence when I was about 14, and somebody had smashed a co*ke bottle. I ended up jumping right onto it and I had to get stitches.

Were the injuries worth it, though?

Yeah, because that’s the way I did it. I remember back in the early ’90s I was talking to some older American guys, and this one guy said, “Look, you see that guy over there who’s dressed exactly the same as you? He’s here so you don’t have to roll in the dirt for six or seven hours a day.” And I’m like, “But I’m playing the character, so I’m gonna be the one rolling in the dirt.” As you get older, you realise they were just trying to point out that maybe it’s better to keep your own tendons. Life’s easier with tendons.

You’ve got a reputation as a perfectionist on set. Do you agree with that description?

That’s so silly, because perfectionists tend to not do anything because nothing’s ever right for them. But while we’re here, and we’ve got the camera, and the lights are set up, and there’s a few hundred people, why don’t we do this until we know it’s a good version of what we’re trying to do? It’s not an irrational thought process at all. Ridley Scott once said to me, before we even started shooting together, “I like how your head works – if you think of something, if you see something wrong, you have to tell me. If you tell me a good idea in post-production, I will f*cking hate you forever.” [Laughs.]

I’m also Australian. Do you think that your reputation also comes from a kind of culture clash, in that Americans sometimes take our no-bullsh*t approach as being rude?

There was definitely quite a bit of that going on. And the self-deprecating thing – sarcasm and self-deprecation in black and white quite often appear to be the opposite. And I had to start learning that, because somebody would say something complimentary, and I’d go, “Oh yeah, blah blah blah.” And [taken in the wrong tone] “Oh yeah, blah blah blah” seems like you’ve made this statement about yourself – as opposed to you responding to somebody else blowing smoke up your bumhole.

Also, you can’t say “c*nt” in America like you can at home.

And it’s one of the most useful words there is! But it’s not just that. There’s a lot of different cultural aspects to it too. You’ve gotta remember that Mad Max was revoiced when it was released in America. It had some anonymous American actor being Max [instead of Mel Gibson]. That was the era we’re talking about, where to be an Australian was so perverse and so odd in that industry. Like, what-are-you-talking-about kind of thing. Judy Davis was around at the time, and quite often people would say to me in this period, “So you’re the new Mel Gibson?” and I’d say, “No, I’m the new Judy Davis.” [Laughs.] But, see, I’d say that and they wouldn’t laugh! They’d look at me like, “Is he trying to tell me he’s gay?!”

But she’s amazing.

She’s amazing! Why wouldn’t I be looking at her work thinking I want to emulate somebody as capable and passionate and compelling as that? But I’m going into meetings where people are saying, “You really shouldn’t be speaking in your natural accent because it’s putting people off.”

Full disclosure: I’ve basically been sent to ask if you’re happy. From social media, you genuinely seem to be having a lovely time.

I’ve been unreasonably happy for most of my life. I know that bothers some people, but that’s just not my problem. I pursue creatively and artistically what I want to do, and I have done that for probably about 35 years, you know? I do it unapologetically. And my choices are always freaking people out. 2011: I went to China and I made The Man With the Iron Fists, directed by RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan. People were like, “What the hell are you doing that for?” And I was like: “Well, I really believe in Bobby Diggs, RZA, I definitely know that he’s got a director’s brain and that he understands film, and when else am I ever gonna get to play a character like this? Who’s, like, blowing bubbles in a bath because he’s pulling anal beads out of [someone] in Shanghai, in whatever the year was supposed to be? Peter Weir didn’t ask me to do that.” [Laughs.]

Which is why I thought the title of your old song that you wrote as a teenager, “I Just Want to Be Like Marlon Brando”, was so interesting. Because obviously he did some batsh*t movies towards the end of his career.

Some of the batsh*t ones are the best work he’s done! That’s the fun of it. You’ve gotta find fresh ground. You have to. I can’t keep playing Bud White [from LA Confidential] over and over again. Or Maximus [from Gladiator] over and over again. It has no appeal to me whatsoever. I’ll do whatever’s next. Now it happens to be in Budapest, playing Hermann Göring. I’m getting to break down one of history’s most enigmatic and famous names and actually try to put some humanity into what feels completely inhuman. I get to go to work every day, I’m looking around the room – there’s Rami Malek, Michael Shannon, Richard E Grant. I’m in a room full of gunfighters and I’m having a f*cking ball.

Crowe has been a musician since his teenage years; for a time, living in Sydney in the late ’80s, he’d pay for his entire rent and food just by busking in the street. When he was given a guitar for Christmas in 1970, the first thing he did was write his own song on it. “I didn’t have a desire for the guitar because I wanted to sing somebody else’s songs,” he says. “I thought this would be an interesting thing to do. To express myself. And that’s really funny when you apply that to a six-year-old kid.” Ask him a question about his life, and Crowe will often say he has a song about that very thing.

In his back catalogue, there are ballads about other people, like the old sugarcane farmer in Northern Queensland, teeth blackened from chewing the cane while he worked, wearing brand-new false teeth on the day he happened to meet Crowe outside a deli in Sydney. There are love songs, there’s life advice, and there’s pain. There are also jokes: after his band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts (or “TOFOG” as it is better known) dissolved in 2003, he named his next band The Ordinary Fear of God to match the initials they had already spray painted on the flight cases. (“People responded like, ‘What a cheap motherf*cker.’ They didn’t get that I was just making a gag!”)

His current band, Indoor Garden Party, has a new album, Prose and Cons, coming out this year. This is why he’s invited me back to the house – he wants to play me some of the new tracks. He fiddles with a Bluetooth speaker, connects it to his phone, and plays the songs at a volume level that only a man who has spent a lifetime playing live music can handle.

What do you get out of being on stage that you don’t get from being an actor on a set?

It’s kind of like a reset and a rebalance. There’s a level of anarchy that goes with the job of walking out onto a stage, because you never really know what’s going to happen that night. You might have a prescribed song list or whatever, or things in your mind that you might want to say, or something comes back from the audience, or their response to a certain song or whatever, and the night just takes on its own meaning. So that feeling of jumping off a cliff like that, that brings me back to a very calm place.

I was also wondering if – before social media – it was a way of speaking to the public without an intermediary.

I’ve said for a long time that you’re going to learn a lot more about me by listening to what I sing songs about than reading what I might say in an interview. And songs have a very strange way of catching up to you. Or you catch up to it. You can write a song about something that then becomes a truth in your life.

Crowe presses play on a song called “Stronger Than Stone”, which he says he wrote as life advice for his two sons. “There’s a good deal of humour, when I say I write life advice for my boys,” he says. “I’m aware of all of the different angles – the positive ones and the self-important ones as well. But it’s still a valid thing to do. There will be a time when I’m not around where it will be sort of like a conversation from beyond.”

What are you saying to them with this one?

Exactly what it says: water is stronger than stone. You make sculptural decisions. They may be permanent but sometimes they’re very heavy to carry around. So I think the key to that song is in the bridge, because what I’m talking about is the passage of your life – and you’ve just got to remember that you’re the river, so where your life flows, how your life flows, is up to you.

But also water has to flow around obstacles…

Or through. My whole life, as a child, I was going to study history at university. That was my thing, that was my passion. It just so happened that my dad lost his job while I was in the last year of high school, ended up being unemployed for a year and a half. And it was better for the family that I left school and got a job so I could contribute, so that’s what I did. I became an entertainer because that was the way that I saw forward where I could affect my family’s life. I could change it from hand to mouth to something else. I’ve [now] got two kids who can basically do whatever they want to do. They don’t have to do that. As a general statement, I look across the happiness quotient in my family, and people are doing their own things, but I know at a certain point I had an influence in them being able to do that.

There’s a line in your Marlon Brando song that goes: “I’m not cut out to be a movie-star toughie, that’s plain to see – it’s the quiet life for me.” Do you think you knew yourself very young to write a line like that?

If you really start doing that, you’re going to find that constantly: where some other creative outlet I have is making a commentary on something else. I wrote a song in 1995 or whatever called “The Photograph Kills”. And that was in reference to when you do a feature film, you get sent 10,000 frames, and you have to kill the ones you don’t want them to use.

That’s not what it sounds like it’s about.

That’s right, but the song talks about what it sounds like. Cut to just a few years later, where everywhere I go I’m being photographed. I can’t get away from it. I have to stay inside hotel rooms because if I go to a window…[mimes flashes going off, pop-pop-pop]. Or literally being chased down the street when I was in LA when the two kids were babies. We [were] locked into a kids’ clothing store by, like, 35 photographers and we couldn’t get out. I had to call vehicles, call security, they had to come down, push these guys out of the way so we could just get our kids into the vehicle. It wouldn’t matter what city in the world it was; it could be Madrid, it could be Paris, it could be Rome, it could be wherever. The constant was you were always being followed around. But again, you get a little older and, I don’t know… in some way, you embody less threat, so people are now prepared to listen to the words that you say. It’s the same with music.

Do you prefer a quiet life?

But I have a quiet life. I do. I go to work – I do my thing. When I’m not at work, I’m in the bush, and it’s me, and some cows, and some dogs, and some horses, chickens – and a lot of space. A lot of places that you can go and take in a view and contemplate things. The quiet times of contemplation are exactly what fuels [you] when you’re on a film set. And it’s what gives you the capacity to be surrounded by people on a street and not lose your sh*t.

The other day I was in Vienna, and I could see I was about to get blocked in by these people, so I very unusually said yes to every photo, but I kept walking. Unless they’re going to run after me, they’re not really going to get what they want. And then in a couple of minutes, that’s died away, and now I’m on an empty alleyway and I know where I am. I walk around enjoying that. But on the other hand, if I’ve said I’m going to be somewhere, and people have come there to see me, then I will be there doing photos until the last person is satisfied. When it’s time to be that guy, I’m that guy. When it’s time to just duck and weave and scoot off… because water is stronger than stone, mate.

There [was] a period of time on the farm where our mail would come once every two weeks, but it was a sack. It took years and years [to go through it]. Every time I went home, I’d tell my niece: “Just put a pile that I can handle on my desk.” So I’d just do a little bit, she sends them off. Some of those people must be getting their sh*t a decade after they sent it. And over time, I’ve now got back to balance. So now I’m only signing what’s just recently arrived.

Is the fan mail for all of your films or mostly about Gladiator?

All sorts. Every now and then... and I’m not implying you just did that, but you have that very unkind journalist who will say, “So you’ve basically got a one-movie career.” And it’s just not true. LA Confidential is something that I talk about with people all the time. There’s a large amount of people who consider that to be virtually a perfect feature film. The Insider is another one that comes up. A Beautiful Mind, obviously. Master and Commander has such a huge audience now. Women love that movie. They love that movie! And I couldn’t figure out why all these chicks were talking to me about Master and Commander. But there’s an aspect to the masculinity in that movie that’s about honour, it’s about fidelity, it’s about, you know, fulfilling your role. There’s a masculinity that’s not toxic.

There’s something attractive about someone who’s capable and takes control.

But then you’ve got something like Nice Guys. People f*cking love that movie. I loved making that movie. Ryan Gosling, Jesus Christ. Trying to work with that kid. I’m famous for not breaking character no matter what – Ridley used to laugh about it. The Colosseum could be collapsing behind me and I’d still be doing my stuff. There’s a thing in acting called corpsing – laughing inappropriately. That little motherf*cker gets me every time.

Does your connection to Italy [Crowe was named Rome’s honorary ambassador to the world in 2022] come from Gladiator or was there family interest before that?

Different relatives have different stories about how we’re connected to Italians, and it was sort of weird no one had any real information. And then somebody put two and two together and we got all this info out of the blue. That’s happened a couple of times this year, actually. My niece was interested in her own genealogy and that brought up a few questions. We had a name of an Italian woman that was in our family and we were able to take it all the way back to the early 1800s in Italy. I know more about my family history as of this year than I’ve ever known. And then obviously that movie [Gladiator] brought me to the centre of that culture in a funny way, because it had a really big effect – not necessarily on the Italians themselves but on other people’s interest in Italian history and Roman history. Like that thing came up recently: how often do you think of the Roman Empire? And it’s like…[laughs] you wouldn’t f*cking know.

Two weeks later, we’re in The Dorchester hotel in London. We sit down on too-soft frilly chairs and flail like upturned turtles. “f*ck, these are sh*t chairs,” he laughs as we move to a different table. A lot can change in two weeks: Crowe has finished the film in Budapest (he’s excited; he thinks it’ll be a good one), and his beard is starting to grow back. He turned 60. As for me, I broke up with my long-term boyfriend four days ago after discovering a life-altering secret. I’ll spare you the details, but this is the background noise when we talk about what the lyrics mean.

In Budapest, you played me a new song called “Michelangelo’s God” that you said was sparked by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. You also said when you went to Rome in 2022, after your dad had died, the Swiss Guard Band was practising nearby and inexplicably – since they only play ecclesiastical music – played the song from his funeral, “Danny Boy”. I wanted to ask if you believe in an afterlife.

[Long pause.] I don’t know. Of course, there’s always going to be what your preference would be. [Laughs.] This is always tricky territory, because it’s so easy for people to decry this. My dad always told my mum that he would come and visit her as a bird. So, it was a couple of days after my dad had passed away. On the farm, I tend to get up early. I like to be up in the darkness. So I was sitting in my office as the sun was coming up, and something along the lines of about 45 or 47 – I lost count of them; they kept moving around – black co*ckatoos landed in the trees outside my office door. I was stunned – I’d never seen that many black co*ckatoos together. They’re the kind of birds you see separately, or in twos and threes. So I opened the door and I was just watching them, or they were watching me. And I looked down. I realised that at the front of the door to my office was a liquidambar seed pod.

Are co*ckatoos known to give gifts? I feed a murder of crows in London and they bring me things.

Crows are known for that. I’ve never heard of this [with co*ckatoos]. Black co*ckatoos are supposed to be a bridge between here and what’s next – they come around to acknowledge when people have passed, you know? That’s a folkloric thing. That’s the Aboriginal thing. And I had a direct experience where that happened. Forty black co*ckatoos rocked up to say, “We know your old man passed.” I can’t explain it. So, you know, I don’t know what the afterlife contains. Pretty damn sure it’s none of the descriptions we’re currently offered.

You’re a storyteller. Why don’t you write scripts or books?

I do a lot more writing than people understand. In my job, you know, you don’t get credited for the writing that you do, necessarily. But now writing is a huge part of what I do. I’ve got probably two or three scripts on the go at the moment. I’ve got a couple that I’ve completed. But that’s a different life too. And at the moment, I have so much work coming in as an actor, I’ve got so many things to do in music as well, that I write in my spare spare spare time, after all the other things. You’re looking at one project in two or three years. I’m a way bigger slu*t than that. [Laughs.]

Would you ever write a novel?

I’ve written a short story, like a novella. I’m not sure if I would write a novel. Not sure if my brain works that way. It’s the same with biography; I think I agree with Oscar Wilde, that biography is a crime. It should be punishable by death or something like that, right? [Wilde said: “Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.”] Autobiography, though, can be so fascinating – the selection of memories that decide to stay in somebody’s head. To me, when I read an autobiography, once the lights start flashing, and the awards start coming in, the money’s rolling in, I’m out of the story. I want to know the early stuff. I think you’ve got to be in a certain place to do that. And I’m still young enough that those stories aren’t ready to be told. There’s still too many people alive who are quite litigious. [Laughs.] So let’s wait a while.

Why do you feel more comfortable telling other people’s life stories?

It’s because I’m the vanilla slice, mate. To make me interesting, you add the flavour. It’s like, OK, I’m now going to do that person’s story, learn about them. But really, in reality, I’m not that interesting as a person.

Dakota Johnson recently said that she struggled filming Madame Web, and how those big-studio superhero movies can feel like art “made by committee”. I wanted to know what your experience is.

I don’t want to make any comments to what anybody else might have said or what their experience is, but… you’re bringing out the impish quality of my humour. [Laughs.] You’re telling me you signed up for a Marvel movie, and some f*cking universe for cartoon characters... and you didn’t get enough pathos? Not quite sure how I can make this better for you. It’s a gigantic machine, and they make movies at a certain size. And you know, I’ve experienced that on the DC side with Man of Steel, Zack Snyder, and I’ve experienced it on the Marvel side via Disney with Thor: Love and Thunder. And I’ve also experienced the [Sony-produced] Marvel dark universe with Kraven the Hunter. These are jobs. You know: here’s your role, play the role. If you’re expecting this to be some kind of life-changing event, I just think you’re here for the wrong reasons.

It can be challenging, working in a blue-screen world, when you have to convince yourself of a lot more than just the internal machinations of your character. But for anything to be... and you can’t make this a direct comment on her because I don’t know her and I don’t know what she went through, and the fact that you can have a sh*t experience on a film… Yeah, you can. But is that the Marvel process? I’m not sure you can say that. I haven’t had a bad experience. I mean [on Thor], OK, it’s a Marvel movie, but it’s Taika Waititi’s world, and it was just a gas every day, being silly.

And then, with JC Chandor on Kraven, I’m just bringing a little weight to the circ*mstances, so the young actors have got an actor they can bounce off. Going to work with JC was fun. You know, so many of these directors have a certain skill level – freaking genius people. Think about what’s required, right? It’s everything: the composition, the framing, the colour, the music, what’s left outside the camera. Whether it’s [Proof director] Jocelyn Moorhouse or it’s Ridley Scott, you’re talking about hanging out with geniuses.

Are there any films you regret passing on?

Only one, really. There’s others that I passed on that did very well financially and that’s a regret for other people, because, you know, people that bring those ones up are the ones that just think in terms of dollars. But there was an experience that I was offered – I now know the director, and I know that him and I working together, surrounded by music, would’ve been a fantastic experience. It was a biopic of a musician that I love. I kind of felt there was a cheating aspect to it, you know. It would put me in a position from a music career perspective that I wouldn’t have earned.

You’re not going to tell me who?

No. Because the thing is, I’m in awe of people these days who say, “I have no regrets.” Really? Not one single thing you ever did. Right? You’re so f*cking perfect. I’ve got a sh*t ton of regrets. An angry word, an overreaction, a missed opportunity for friendship – lots of things like that. But all of those things are in perspective, because I’ve done lots of really cool sh*t too. My regrets are, in a way, badges of honour. Having the ability to have that introspection and go, “You know, the other day you were a f*cking dick, mate. Do your best not to be a f*cking dick like that again.”

Regrets are also like emotional scars, or warnings to not go there again.

Yeah. And fertiliser.

Makes good songs, right?

Yep. Little bit of ash in the soil.

The last time we spoke, you said that the best way to know you is by listening to your songs, so I did. I wanted to ask you about one you wrote for your kids, “This Is How Life Is”. It begins, “Nobody tells the truth / Nobody sticks to the plan,” and goes on to say, “All friends are fair weathered / So move to a place where it doesn’t snow.” I thought it was quite a depressing picture of life.

It’s a true picture of life. That song has nothing to do with being sad. At all. It’s a reality break. It’s human nature to bullsh*t. You know, don’t freak out if somebody bullsh*ts you.

The mention of bullsh*t is the point at which I blub out the whole emotional situation with my relationship. I’m not proud: I’m sobbing at Russell Crowe before I’ve even told my family. I mean, my God.

Wow. f*ck that guy. I’m so sorry. Christ… You’re going to need some scones, aren’t you?

Crowe squeezes my arm and looks around for a waiter.

So it’s telling them not to freak out when it all goes wrong, because it probably will?

No doubt. Particularly if you are pursuing something that you love, you know what I mean? You can’t prescribe how that’s gonna turn out. You can only offer your effort. Because if you’re in pursuit of something, the only way that changes is if you give up. If you’re looking for, like, golden philosophy, you’ve probably come to the wrong man. This is practical stuff.

The other song you told me to listen to, because I asked about vulnerability, was “Disappeared”. In it, you write – and I know lies are sticking out to me in everything, so I may be reading into this – “I’m everything to everybody / And not true to a single one /Once or twice to you / In a sentence never spoken.” What are you saying?

Now that we’re into deep, deep sadness here... and it’s incredible that you shared that. Now, look, you do whatever you want. But you just showed me a side of your personality that’s so f*cking courageous, man. It is so courageous. I appreciate you on a different level. So I’m gonna tell you the truth about that album. That entire album is me talking to my [now ex-] wife, saying, “We can’t get divorced. What are you doing?” Pretty much every song that I wrote for that album – “Too Far Gone”, “Sadness of a Woman”, “Love is Impossible”, “Disappeared” – that’s all about my marriage. And I was wondering if having her sing those words, if she would see through them and understand what I was trying to communicate to her. [The album, The Crowe/Doyle Songbook Vol III, came out in 2011. In late 2012, it was reported that Crowe and his wife had separated; the divorce was finalised in 2018.]

You couldn’t speak to her in words, so you had to speak to her in song lyrics?

We’d done all that. That was continuous. But I think if somebody makes an intellectual decision that they don’t hear you on any level of specialness any more, then there’s just really not anything you can say at that point, because it won’t be heard. You will not come up with a magic sentence to unlock their heart. However, poetry has a different way of allowing people to examine their own thoughts.

I definitely feel like the introspective love song period, the “woe is me” sitting in a corner period, those periods are gone, you know? The sort of big, bold, “I can do anything” – that’s gone too. But what’s replaced it is somebody that says, “You know what? Life’s frickin’ great.” You know what I mean? I’ve got all these scars, man. I’ve done all this. Done divorce, done this, done that. Bottom line: life’s still great. You’re gonna have your sh*t days, all right? [He looks over the top of his glasses at me, like a protective but firm dad.] This is how life is.

See Russell Crowe at GQ Heroes in Oxfordshire, from 3-5 July, in association with BMW UK. For more information and tickets, visit GQHeroes.com.

Styling by Rose Forde
Grooming by Lucy Halperin
Tailoring by Faye Oakenfull
Set Design by Miguel Bento