Actor Russell Crowe earned an Oscar for 2000’s Gladiator, but he wasn’t always on board to star as Maximus in the iconic film. Crowe said in an interview with Vanity Fair that he nearly backed out of the movie because he thought the script didn’t make sense.
“I was confident about my abilities as a leading man,” Crowe said (via Variety). “What I wasn’t confident about with Gladiator was the world that was surrounding me. 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 sorts of strange sequences.”
As Crowe recalls, the original script had Gladiators riding chariots featuring product placement for olive oil and other items. This was based on real historical truth, but Crowe didn’t think a modern audience would buy into it.