
Acclaimed actor Russell Crowe rose to motion picture fame as a brooding, antihero, noir detective, investigating and attacking murderous killers in the Oscar-nominated, neo-noir film L.A. Confidential (1997). After this performance, Crowe became known for his Hollywood bad boy star persona, exuding virile masculinity on and off screen. The actor has even been referred to as a diva, adding authenticity to his cinematic image.
In his myriad screen portrayals, Crowe has offered variations on his noir antihero and admitted that he has been drawn to play challenging, complex, dark, brooding characters who terrify him in intense cinematic performances that were emotionally exhausting. He also prided himself on not churning out endless sequels of films such as Gladiator (2000) as a rare badge of honor. Contemporaneous discourse – from Hollywood industry trade journals, social media, interviews, articles, videos, reviews, and behind the scenes documentaries – contextualizes Crowe's enduring masculine cinematic presence as noir tough guy on and off screen over his extensive career working in Hollywood films.
In the digital streaming era, Crowe's neo-noir motion pictures have experienced a cinematic resurgence in popularity: L.A. Confidential, Master and Commander (2003), Cinderella Man (2005), State of Play (2009), and most recently The Pope’s Exorcist (2023). The resonance of these Crowe performances and his influence on and off screen was heightened, especially during and after the global pandemic, by his presence on social media and interviews looking back at his storied career. In fact, The Pope’s Exorcist was so successful as a number one film streaming on Netflix that a sequel is now planned, which breaks Crowe's decades-long streak. Recent contemporary media discourse contextualizes and reframes his remarkable cinematic performances and popular culture influence as evolving masculine Hollywood bad boy, thus reimagining the noir antihero on screen and off in L.A. Confidential, Cinderella Man, State of Play, Master and Commander, and The Pope's Exorcist.
Crowe Bucks the System: L.A. Confidential
Crowe emerged into huge Hollywood screen stardom as an explosive, scrappy, volatile, masculine, noir antihero: Bud White, a tormented detective and underdog survivor who bucks a corrupt system, solves a string of grisly murders, and knocks off misogynistic predators. Crowe's noir tough guy, Bud White, is violent, seeks vengeance and retribution, yet reveals vulnerability as he is nearly killed in his pursuit of justice in the neo-noir L.A. Confidential. As Eve Crosbie reported, adding synergy and verisimilitude to his flawed, maligned, tough guy persona on and off screen, Crowe stated that the studio – Warner Bros. – initially tried to get him to quit the picture, so they could cast a more established tough guy and bigger star. "A few days into the rehearsals, the studio stopped paying the bill at the hotel, and they stopped paying for my rental car," Crowe explained. Since he was not yet an established name in the US, executives wanted a more recognized neo-noir screen entity with seasoned star power. As Crowe recalled, "The studio didn't want me to be in that role. They wanted, I think, Sean Penn and Robert De Niro in the film." However, not unlike his strong character challenging crooked institutions on screen, Crowe was "undeterred" by studio pressure and intimidation tactics meant to urge the actor to drop out of the film production. He expounded, "There was probably a four or five-day period there where I was leaving the hotel" in the "morning by going down the back stairs because I knew the manager of the hotel was waiting for me in the foyer to ask when the bill was going to be paid…If I paused and said, 'I'm not turning up to work,' they [the studio] just would have taken that opening to get me out of the movie." A strong-willed maverick off screen, like his noir-styled film antiheroes on screen, Crowe kept showing up on set for rehearsals and the production of L.A. Confidential until the studio executives finally recognized the actor was not leaving the picture or giving up his role. Likely, they saw dailies that impressed them as well.
Directed by Curtis Hanson, adapted from a James Elroy novel, the acclaimed film was a massive success: made for $35 million, the neo-noir earned over $126 million and was Oscar-nominated for Best Picture. L.A. Confidential was certainly worthy of the Academy Award – a huge upset when the film did not receive it – and Crowe's powerful noir antihero performance was essential to the film and certainly should have been nominated for Best Actor, an honor he received a few years later for Gladiator (2000).
Crowe, Masculinity, and Male Camaraderie:
Master and Commander
Adapting writer Patrick O'Brian's seafaring historical novels in Master and Commander, director Peter Weir reimagined Crowe's masculine persona – set sailing aboard a British Royal Navy, early nineteenth-century frigate, the HMS Surprise. In the wake of his Best Picture-winning film Gladiator as well as his Best Actor Oscar, Crowe plays sea captain "Lucky" Jack Aubrey, a maverick who is also a gutsy, brave, strong, daring seaman, defying orders, obsessed with pursuing an enemy French privateer ship around the dangerous Cape Horn to the Galápagos Islands during the Napoleonic Wars. The film featured fabulous direction by Weir and an all-male ensemble, including Paul Bettany as Aubrey's friend, the ship's surgeon and naturalist Dr. Stephen Maturin. The picture has even been referred to as a bromance because of the actors' powerful portrayal of male camaraderie and rapport with one another.
Contextualizing and gleaning insight into some of his earlier films, Crowe asked on social media, "Why are so many guys obsessed with Master and Commander?" He then linked to a British GQ article by Gabriella Paiella. Describing the 2003 picture Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, she wrote, "Twenty years after its release, the mildly successful historical, nautical drama has become an inescapable hit with a certain type of movie fan." As she explains, recalling the recent renewed streaming success of the film in the digital era, the movie "has found a new life on the internet, simultaneously the subject of memes and sincerely beloved by a certain type of guy. So why does the movie, which is streaming…suddenly have such a grip on the public imagination?" For one thing, voyaging to the far side of the world, Weir's majestic film even includes amazing second unit footage shot while journeying down the coast of South America, featuring seascapes along the coastlines of Brazil, Argentina, Cape Horn, and the Galápagos Islands. Moreover, Paiella adds, "Any nostalgia stirred up by Master and Commander is also nostalgia for a different era of Hollywood. This sort of richly detailed, big-budget historical epic rarely gets a chance in today's movie landscape." Paiella recognized the film's "low-key intimacy" and called it an "exquisite Dad Movie" and "an unlikely streaming favorite, a poster child for the kind of movies Hollywood doesn't make anymore, and a beacon of positive masculinity."
Crowe noted in interviews how he learned to play the violin for the role – shown in marvelous scenes in which Jack and Stephen make music together – and noted it was the hardest thing he had ever done. The GQ article highlighted responses to the film from fans and even Crowe's social media response when someone said they were bored: "That's the problem with kids these days. No focus. Peter Weir's film is brilliant. An exacting, detail oriented, epic tale of fidelity to Empire & service, regardless of the cost. Incredible cinematography by Russell Boyd & a majestic soundtrack. Definitely an adults movie." The article also included Crowe in a video interview that fans could watch while reading about the resurgent streaming popularity of Master and Commander and its reinterpreted noir hero.
Crowe on Tough Guy Hard Knocks, Verisimilitude, Injury,
and Portraying Real People: Cinderella Man
In the 2020 GQ video interview, "Russell Crowe Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters," the actor discusses the "responsibility" of "going the extra mile" in portraying "real people" and "somebody else's life" in his screen roles. Crowe's dedication and serious commitment to create verisimilitude in his portrayal of real people on screen is certainly evident in his intense performances reimagining his masculine, noir, antihero persona working with director Ron Howard on the atmospheric biographical pictures A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man.
Like a virile, tough guy in a film noir, Crowe also provided insight in his social media posts as to the physical intensity and danger performing violent scenes in gritty, demanding roles. For example, in playing a film character in a true story of an actual boxer, a prize fighter laid low by injuries who goes on to win the heavyweight title, Crowe described how he was injured while training rigorously to play the role of the underdog Great Depression era boxer James "Bulldog" Braddock in director Ron Howard's 2005 film Cinderella Man. Crowe explained, "While training for Cinderella Man I experienced a subluxation of my left shoulder which required surgery. I knew that Ron Howard and the studio were concerned so I thought I'd send a video to relax them. 21 days after surgery I was back in the ring." In preparation for the physically strenuous role of playing an actual boxer from the 1930s, Crowe described cycling up steep mountainous slopes and noted, "One of the benefits was being able to do the physical work at home [training in Australia]…Everything was set up in the bush, training personnel and equipment, including a full size boxing ring under a marquee."
Along with Crowe's compelling rendering of the character, the film sported a gorgeous, atmospheric, shadowy, neo-noir visual style and design with stunning cinematography to capture the brutal action of the boxing scenes. As reported by John Calhoun in the article "Hard Knocks" for American Cinematographer, the director of photography, Salvatore Totino, observed, "Jim Braddock was fighting for one reason: he wanted to get his life back…I really wanted the viewer to feel as though he's in the ring." Filmed in Toronto, Totino worked with Clairmont Camera to develop a special "punching-bag camera" for shooting boxing sequences in Cinderella Man, which they called the "tire cam," basically a "big tire covered in foam with a mount on the inside for the camera, and with Plexiglas on the front to protect the lens." The cinematographer described how they shot the film to emulate the violent punches of the boxing experience for viewers, for an up close and personal view of Crowe fighting in the ring: "There are a few quick moments of the opponent getting hit, and Russell was actually hitting the camera. It was suspended off a bungee from the top and bottom with truss rings, so it wouldn't sway around too much. There was a little monitor in the back of it so that I could see, and I had a handle to hold the back of the tire and control what the punch felt like; it could be a big pan for a big punch, or, if I held it tight, it was like a combination of a left, a right, and a left hitting you in the face – it didn't spin your head around, it just sort of knocked you back a little."
Philip French in his Guardian review of Cinderella Man wrote, "Braddock became an emblematic, inspirational hero for the downtrodden and unemployed, the insulted and injured of the Depression...Excellent as always, Crowe plays Braddock with simple dignity, as a man without guile, in contrast to another man of essential decency, his manager, Joe Gould, played by the admirable Paul Giamatti as both sly and kind, inspirational and manipulative. After Pearl Harbor, the pair volunteered together for army service." French added, "The fights are excellently managed by Howard and his director of photography, Salvatore Totino, who lights them in the style of the great, early-20th-century boxing painter George Bellows, and uses different lenses to make the ring look alternately like a vast arena and a claustrophobic box from which there is no escape. These fights are as tough, varied, and physically exhausting to the spectator as any I've seen."
Evocative of his cinematic antihero Bud White, in the wake of Crowe's portrayals of tough, scrappy, masculine survivors engaging in physical violence in films like L.A. Confidential, Gladiator, and Cinderella Man, Crowe's off-screen dust-ups and heated encounters also contextualized his gritty screen performances. Spanning the production and reception of these films, especially earlier in his career from the late 1990s through 2005, such encounters arguably heightened the intensity of Crowe's cinematic presence on and off screen accentuating his image as a rebellious bad boy defying authority, including an off-camera scrap while promoting Cinderella Man in New York City where Crowe was arrested and charged with assault not unlike a volatile, noir antihero in his films.
Crowe as Investigative Maverick Solving Murder Mystery Crimes: State of Play
Interestingly, just a few years after Cinderella Man, in the underrated 2009 neo-noir thriller film State of Play, as well as in his 2014 directorial debut The Water Diviner, and even more recently in the hugely successful lean budgeted 2023 supernatural thriller The Pope's Exorcist, Crowe portrayed independent, self-reliant, maverick rebels who defy institutional authority and speak truth to power in a variation on the volatile, violent antiheroes of the ilk seen in Bud White of L.A. Confidential or in Maximus of Gladiator.
In the noir-style, political thriller State of Play, Crowe embodies the role of seasoned investigative journalist Cal McAffrey, in a part originally intended for Brad Pitt, solving crimes and informing the public in the nation's capital, Washington, D.C. Crowe's character is out of shape, and his office, desk, car, and apartment are a chaotic mess, but he's a shrewd reporter (for a paper suggesting The Washington Post) doggedly pursuing truth amid rampant corruption, standing up to powerful entities and, like a detective, noir narrative as in L.A. Confidential, solving a series of mysterious murders.
In fact, Crowe's protagonist is ultimately betrayed by his friend and former roommate, Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), and nearly killed investigating the murder story. Scottish director Kevin Macdonald, grandson of Hungarian-British filmmaker Emeric Pressburger, adapted what was originally a British mini-series into a feature film and was inspired by the political intrigue and corruption of All the President's Men (1976), set during the 1974 Watergate scandal of the Nixon era. Crowe's performance as a driving force and a strong, active character propelling the narrative of the seedy goings on in State of Play's homicidal story was particularly impressive. In an article written by Charles McGrath, Macdonald praised Crowe: "The great thing about Russell is that he's so unvain. I explained to him that this guy is a bit of a schlub, a bit of a loser, he lives in the kind of apartment where you would never have people over, and Russell got that right away. The interesting thing is that Russell had such contempt for the press to begin with. He hates reporters. It took him a while to acknowledge that there could be such a thing as journalists who were idealistic and incorruptible." As Crowe's character activates an investigative detective framework in the noir style of a crime-mystery-thriller narrative in State of Play, Roger Ebert referred to Crowe's protagonist as a "scruffy hero" in a film "that is acutely aware of the crisis affecting newspapers."
Crowe from Films to Social Media to Launching a Studio in the Wake of the Pandemic
The resonance of these Crowe performances and productions reimagining his masculine persona as the noir antihero and his influence on and off screen was heightened, especially during and in the wake of the global pandemic, by his presence on social media, his directing and producing of films, as well as launching a major filmmaking studio production facility – a key "Aussiewood" location near his home in Australia – alongside recent videos and interviews looking back at his storied career. In addition to acting and performing music (and co-owning a soccer team), Crowe, of course, also directed and produced films, such as The Water Diviner, Robin Hood, and Poker Face. Crowe's 2014 directorial debut The Water Diviner was a particularly beautiful film, where Crowe played a more vulnerable variation on masculinity as he movingly portrayed a grieving father searching for his lost and missing sons after they are presumed to have perished in World War I.
A few years later, the Hollywood bad boy actor and filmmaker even extended his initial screen persona of noir antihero to that of a mogul striving to compete with Hollywood studios as Crowe also announced a new major motion picture production studio. As the media industry and motion picture production, distribution, and exhibition worldwide was heavily affected by the global pandemic from 2020 onward. In 2021, Katherine Tulich, writing for Variety, noted that Crowe launched Pacific Bay Studios in Australia and "announced concrete plans to fulfill his long-held dream of operating a movie studio in northern New South Wales, close to where he has lived for the past 25 years." Tulich reported that Crowe unveiled details of a new facility at Coffs Harbour. The actor and filmmaker explained, "I want the East Coast of Australia to be synonymous with the film industry, globally." Crowe hoped the new production complex could open in the next three to five years, adding, "The region, which includes picturesque Byron Bay, has been getting a lot of Hollywood attention lately as Australia continues to be a COVID-safe production magnet." In life, he was as bold as his noir characters on screen.
Crowe Reimagines a Noir Antihero Detective as One Who Investigates Evil and Demonic Possession in the Gothic
Thriller: The Pope's Exorcist
In the 2023 film The Pope's Exorcist, Crowe created a thrilling variation on his tormented masculine, noir, antihero detective. This Gothic thriller resonated with audiences as a seasoned padre investigates evil and demonic possessions. In a clever reimagining of The Exorcist (1976) movie – in which a demon inhabits a person and a priest struggles to cast the demon out – the film The Pope's Exorcist was inspired by a fascinating actual person, an Italian priest, Father Gabriele Amorth, who was the Catholic church's chief exorcist from 1992 until his death at age 91 in 2016.
Crowe was intrigued by the prospect of portraying an actual person with an incredible, nearly unbelievable career in real life. As Clark Collins reported, Crowe said, "What attracted me to this piece was the character himself…I was intrigued with the job title: Chief Exorcist for the Vatican. I was sure some Hollywood screenwriter had come up with a snappy title. When I looked into it, I realized it was a real thing. Then, looking deeper again, I just found him fascinating. He documented the job, and so, from an actor's perspective, that's just a treasure chest, man." Crowe researched his part; in this instance, a wealth of historical information was available because Amorth published extensively, including numerous articles and books such as the 1999 volume, An Exorcist Tells His Story. Amorth's work was also featured in director William Friedkin's 2017 nonfiction documentary film The Devil and Father Amorth.
In his rendering of the masculine, investigative antihero, Crowe brings Amorth vividly to life by speaking fluent Italian and infusing an Italian accent into his English. This padre appears as an unconventional, self-styled maverick, defying bureaucratic church authorities, swigging double espressos, and speeding on an Italian motor scooter through the streets of Rome in a black fedora, sunglasses, and cassock on the way to an ominous Spanish castle haunted by the demon/devil who possesses a young boy, Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney).
Indeed, the supernatural thriller, set in 1987 and brilliantly directed by Julius Avery, is driven by the compelling force of Crowe's striking, mesmerizing character. His dark, sardonic humor infuses the film with black comedy, along with his compassionate empathy for the afflicted, and his fond, moving camaraderie with a young Spanish priest Father Esquibel, played by Daniel Zovatto. The film emulates a buddy movie as the two struggle and endeavor to rid the world of evil and save people from demonic affliction amid a wild, atmospheric array of phantasmagoria. When grilled by stern officials at the Vatican, Crowe's gutsy, courageous Amorth replies that he served with the partisan resistance during World War II and that he "know[s] a firing squad when [he] see[s] one," adding that they can speak to his boss, the Pope, played by Franco Nero, who assigned him the dangerous mission at the haunted mansion in Spain.
Not insignificantly, the Oscar-winning Gladiator star was also honored in real life by being named the official ambassador of Rome in 2022, the same year Crowe began working on The Pope's Exorcist. In researching the film, Collins reported, Crowe became an expert on Amorth. Crowe explained, "Gabriele comes from the town of Modena, which also is where Ferrari comes from…I used that to give him a couple of little extra quirks that you wouldn't necessarily see with a priest. He wears red socks under his cassock, and he has a Ferrari sticker on his Lambretta motor scooter." Crowe continued, "From what I gathered biographically, at the age of 17 he goes to Rome, he believes he's had a calling to work for God, and the priest that he talked to said, 'Look, you're just too young, you have no life experience, you should just go away and learn a little bit about life.' This is 1942, he returns to Modena, the world is at war, he ends up joining the resistance and fights with the partisans against the fascists." Shockingly, Crowe stated, "This young man who had this calling to God, now he finds himself with a gun in his hand and he's shooting to kill, and being shot at. He comes out of his war years, completes law school, and ends up working as a journalist. Returns to Rome, to the same priest, and says, 'I still have this calling,' and that time, the father says, 'Perfect, because you have all the experience, you know all these things.'"
Associated Press and Business Insider called Crowe's Gothic noir antihero the "James Bond of exorcists," and director Julius Avery recognized the film's investigative detective-like narrative framework in solving a dangerous, deadly, mystery crime. He also admitted the filmmakers were fond of and inspired by Dirty Harry, detective films, as well as series like Columbo. Drawing on an actual person in this biopic, melding comedy and camaraderie, and promoted as a supernatural thriller, The Pope's Exorcist was not a typical horror film. In interviews, Crowe insisted he does not like horror films and played tennis with the crew when not filming to get away from the "darkness" of the shadowy demonic set, with horrifying makeup, in this dark, wet, rainy, nighttime noir. Crowe admitted the story was challenging to film and explained, "When you're doing a movie like this, the hours do start to grind on you. And the circumstances that you're in. I'm doing scenes day after day with that small boy made up to be a demon with these bright red piercing eyes and that will have a certain resonance for you at the end of your work day. And just things like shooting at nighttime under rain towers and stuff like that."
Like the actual Gothic antihero, Crowe's masculine-seasoned padre in the film explains that 98% of the people he sees need a psychiatrist, not an exorcist, and he refers them on to receive medical and psychological treatment. When a cardinal inquires about the other 2%, Crowe replies: "Ah, the other 2% – this is something that has confounded all of science and all of medicine for a very long time…I call it evil." Crowe explained that those qualities were what drew him to Amorth's character: his "unshakable purity of faith and his wicked sense of humor."
In Elizabeth Vincentelli's New York Times review of The Pope's Exorcist, she calls the film, "A Head-Spinning Genre Mash-Up," adding: "The buddy-priest action-comedy-horror hybrid we didn't know we wanted has finally landed." Calling the film "surreal" and recognizing its genre experimentation, she praised the film and its performances, writing, "Father Amorth is portrayed as an espresso-drinking, scooter-riding maverick by Russell Crowe in one of his most engaging performances in years." Crowe even posted a clever parody video online with a hotline for demonic possession to promote the film.
In the press media discourse of 2024, Stuart Heritage of The Guardian observed, "The Pope's Exorcist seduced Netflix last year," casting a "dark spell." Crowe joined the film in June 2022, filming began two months later, and everything was wrapped up three months after that. By all accounts, it was an unexpected success. The Pope's Exorcist made its budget back four-and-a-half times over and spent more than a week as the most-watched film on Netflix. Shot for a mere $18 million in Ireland and Rome, Italy, the movie went on to make $77 million theatrically at the box office, despite declining theater attendance in the wake of the pandemic.
In an unexpected culmination and amalgam reimagining his earlier screen roles and masculine persona as an iconic, noir antihero, Crowe's indelible Gothic thriller performance in The Pope's Exorcist soared in popularity. In fact, The Pope’s Exorcist was so successful on screen and as a number one film streaming on Netflix that a sequel with Crowe is now planned. If this movie premieres, Crowe's projection of a noir padre will break his decades-long streak of avoiding a sequel as well as prove that the staple of the Hollywood noir bad boy is here to stay, even in the new streaming era.
March 2025
From guest contributor Sheri Chinen Biesen, Professor of Film History at Rowan University and author of Through a Noir Lens: Adapting Film Noir Visual Style
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