How the Crowe Flies: Russell Crowe is The Rake's Issue 103 Cover Star
Now is the time of monsters — again. And into our febrile world steps Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring in the new psychological drama Nuremberg. Oscar-winning Crowe talks to TOM CHAMBERLIN about morality, the behaviour of men, and what this world — this malfunctioning world — needs more of.
I was the personification of empathy when The Rake’s interview with Russell Crowe began. An odd thing to say, perhaps, but you see, I am a terrible traveller; I can barely do the school run without needing a restorative nap. Mr. Crowe had lately spent a lot of time crossing time zones. He had also been clear in a recent interview, with Joe Rogan, that he had exhausted himself by working hard on a bunch of projects that had converged at the same time, and the experience had played quite the number on his mind and his energy. So when, just 24 hours after flying from Los Angeles to Sydney, he had to “crawl out of the [jet-lag] dip” to jump on a Zoom call with yours truly, he was looking eye-to-eye at a sympathetic face.
That being said, what came through the screen was gale- force Crowe. He spoke with an assuredness that bypasses most politicians — his speaking voice is the kind of tempered roar that we have not heard since Richard Burton or Paul Robeson — and he was also warm, welcoming and kind to someone who could have taken the conversation in uncomfortable directions. I had recently watched Nuremberg, a film I think is more timely and important than Oppenheimer, and as a not-so-closeted world-war-II enthusiast, I was ready to dive in with my questions, but we began with something gentler and more wholesome and personal: farming.
Crowe is a quarter of a century into a project of tree-planting on his farm in Australia — 36,000 of them, from red cedar to white mahogany. They are trees that flourish on his land but were stripped prior to the Great War. The farm on which this regeneration is taking place has expanded over the years. It started at 100 acres (it is now 1,700), for which he paid $215,000 on January 20, 1996 — before L.A. Confidential and his epic rise. “I had a little bit of money in the bank,” he says. “I was able to borrow the rest of the purchasing price from a good friend. At an exorbitant interest rate, I might add. I didn’t grow up on the land. I grew up as an urban sewer rat, where my dad was a pub manager. So I had that kind of life as a kid. But we would go and visit relatives on the land. For some reason, all of that really stuck.”
Farming and a connection to the land has drawn many people to the countryside, its peacefulness, spirituality, how it grounds us and purifies the soul. Russell must wonder what has taken the rest of us so long to come round to his thinking. He says: “I call it the ‘panacea’; it will fix all ills. But you have to go there and give over to it.”
We shall get on to film, but not before we discuss another passion of his — rugby league, or, as Australians call it, football. Crowe’s father’s pub was in the district of the South Sydney Rabbitohs team, and that gave him all the impetus he needed. He would spend the weekends around his dad at work on Botany Road, which would be “festooned with red-and-green streamers, so I actually thought the entire world loved the football team from that area”. That wasn’t even true in his own house, for even his father supported St. George. “I grew up in a household divided,” he says. “My brother and I went for different teams, and every now and then that wasn’t great.”
He is a competitive man, and says he grew up in a competitive family environment. When I mentioned that my school taught us not to celebrate when taking a wicket, Crowe says, “No, you must celebrate. This is the difference between Australian cricket and English cricket: make that man realise, It was his wicket, it was his life, it has been taken, he shall now march away. I am an absolute terror to play any sport against. I will look you in the eye and begin to try and crush you mentally. But once the game is over, I am going to be a very fun person to enjoy the post-game situation with, win or lose.”
When Crowe speaks about the stupidity of progress, it doesn’t sound cynical. He has the air of a man who has seen too much evidence of our capacity to repeat ourselves. Perhaps this is a good time to bring in this year’s cinematic parable, Nuremberg (distributed in the U.K. by Sky U.K.). Crowe talks about Nuremberg with the same clarity he brings to farming or sport: a deep respect for systems, for how things break down, and for how easily they are corrupted.
Hermann Göring was, to all intents and purposes, a pantomime villain. He was a man who understood how to make politics performative, so the uniform and staff he carried were entirely made up by him to stand out among the Nazi high command and harness, to great effect, the wonder the Luftwaffe had over young Germans. However, Crowe is no panto player, and he grips this role with the right level of earnestness. Nuremberg is a study in how history repeats itself through misplaced trust and the seduction of confidence. The film ends with a quote from R.G. Collingwood: The only clue to what man can do is what man has done. “People say the film is timely,” Crowe says, “but if it was 10 years ago it would still be timely. And 10 years from now it’ll still be timely. That’s the point.” He spent five years researching Göring before the cameras rolled, owing to delays in funding, and the effort shows. He had time to follow the character down blind historical alleys, reject unreliable scholarship, and sit in long contemplation about what makes a man like that possible.
I am a terror to play any sport against. But once the game is over, I am going to be a very fun person to be with.
Crowe was struck by Göring’s contradictions, the kind that rarely survive when history is taught as moral shorthand. “He was a failure in regular school,” he says, “but he became a top student in military school because he was interested in it.” He talks about the teenage mountaineer who conquered Alpine traverses long before the era of modern equipment, the first-world-war ace with 22 confirmed kills, and the calculating political operator who could humiliate Goebbels without consequence. “None of this excuses anything,” Crowe says, raising a hand. “It’s just more complex than people’s understanding.”
When you play a bad guy, the worst thing to do is play a single note. With Göring, the music is big, blotchy chords.
Complexity, for Crowe, is the moral duty of an actor portraying monstrosity. Play Göring as a buffoon and you reduce him to something safe, something cordoned off from the present. But portray him as human — petty, narcissistic, charming, cunning, addicted, damaged — and you reveal what is truly frightening: that evil often arrives dressed in competence. “When you play a ‘bad guy’, the worst thing you can do is play a single note,” he tells me. “With Göring, the music is big, blotchy chords — both hands on the keyboard.”
Those chords are what allow the horror to make sense. They show how an ordinary citizen might have been drawn in; how a nation might have mistaken bravado for strength and not taken Jesus’s advice to be wary of false prophets; and, in this case, how a courtroom — even after the war — could feel the gravitational pull of a man who’d lived his life bending systems to his will. Crowe was insistent the film include the moment in the trial when the American prosecutor falters, and it falls to the Englishman Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe to dismantle Göring. “Historically, we owe that to the audience,” Crowe says. “It shows why he was taken apart, and at the end of the day it’s for no other reason than his ego.” And yet, as with Al Capone, he almost got away with it.
Grooming: Natalia Bruschi
Photography Team: Brandon Smith, Kevin McHugh, Paul Rae and Kendra Frankle
Production: Copious Special
Special Thanks to The Beverly Hills Hotel & Bungalows
