RUSSELL CROWE GQ COVER STORY

An overcast afternoon in the summer of 2009 in Bourne Woods, a coniferous forest in Surrey, about an hour outside London.  It was here, a decade ago, that Maximus Decimus Meridius made camp against the defiant Germanic hordes, here that Russell Crowe and Sir Ridley Scott unleashed hell, reinventing the historical epic for contemporary audiences. Now they're back, and we've jumped in time and place from Roman Europe in the second century AD to 12th-century France, for a blockbuster retelling of the Robin Hood story.

The air smells of stable and smoke. Rain falls in globby splots. At the summit of a hill, Scott - the British director of Alien, Blade Runner and Thelma & Louise, not to mention Gladiator - has overseen the erection of a 65-feet tall French castle. Around its base mill hundreds of English soldiers, commanded by King Richard, who sits on a grubby white charger. Thousand-strong volleys of arrows occasionally pass overhead. As the day wears on they diminish ever so slightly in volume as extras smuggle them off-set as "mementos". The ground is a mess of mud and mannequin corpses. One extra, pinned to the dirt in a pool of red sucrose, has to keep flinching to prevent set dressers stabbing him with arrows. The sombre air of a military campaign is offset by the "Frenchmen" on the castle's ramparts, who amuse themselves by quoting Monty Python. As they prepare to hurl fake rocks one can hear faint cries go up: "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"

In the middle distance, I catch sight of my own target. As Robin Hood, Russell Crowe is dressed in a leather jerkin, heavy armour and leather trousers, the impression of a Middle Ages warrior undermined only slightly by his sunglasses and cigarette. He walks with the steady, methodical gait of a statesman, and even with the anachronistic accessories - he's now speaking into a walkie-talkie - he still looks like a man worth following into battle.

The shot he and his director want requires Crowe to dart through the chaos of battle, climb a portcullis and rescue a trapped soldier. The pair then drop 12 feet and rush behind the safety of their compatriots' shields.

Moments after completion of this stunt, I'm introduced to Crowe. "Hello, Andrew," he says in his measured antipodean baritone, settling on the more formal version of my name, the one only used by my parents.

Crowe is affable, but clearly in some discomfort after jumping from the portcullis. "You've got to Butch and Sundance it and land together, but we had no peat, no protection, nothing. I said to them afterwards: "Lads, where was it? 'Oh yeah, Russell, we forgot.' Fuckers."

Crowe pauses, considering something. "It would be a very good idea if you came to my trailer," he says. "Because I'm going to ice my feet. And that's all I'm going to do. I'm going to have a Guinness. If you like, you can have one too. I'll see you there in six minutes."

That settled, he presses ahead, shaking hands with a few mud-splattered soldiers before clambering into a four-wheeled vehicle known as a Gator, the bonnet of which is stencilled with the white rabbit logo of his rugby league team, South Sydney Rabbitohs.

As Crowe weaves his way through the cannon fodder, I hear my name being shouted. Crowe's costumer, Michael Castellano, a tattooed man whose long silver pony tail gives him the air of an aged pirate, is calling. "Come on Andy!" he yells. "Run! If you don't get in there quick he's going to kill you!" I pick up my pace, and arrive at a cluster of trailers, arranged around a canopied area. A small group has congregated - assorted grips, stuntmen, extras and some (increasingly) Merry Men - to enjoy the first of the night's beers. Castellano passes me a can of Guinness and a pint glass, pointing me towards the least impressive trailer. Thunder rolls and it begins to rain.

Crowe is sitting in the gloom at the end of a glorified tin can. He has tried and failed to make it homely: there are photos of his two children, six-year-old Charlie and three-year-old Tennyson, the latter wearing a T-shirt saying "My Dad Rocks". In front of the mirror there's a handwritten note that says "wedding ring", a reminder to remove any sign of his seven-year marriage to Danielle Spencer, an actress he met on his first film The Crossing, while shooting a scene.

Crowe has changed into a red T-shirt and navy North Face tracksuit. His feet are bare, and ice packs are strapped with black tape to his ankles. He looks profoundly uncomfortable. As I sit on a stool next to him he's mid-way through his first stout of the night. I crack mine open and it burbles over the top. "It's supposed to do that... it's the widget," he says. I feel about 15. In a minute, he'll probably call me Andrew again.

He says it feels strange to be back in Bourne Woods, filming another epic with his co-conspirator, "Riddles". The other day he noticed a gash in a tree, caused by a scene in Gladiator in which his character decapitates a foe. "The previous ten years of my life just flopped in front of me like a picnic blanket," he says. "I got this unusually satisfying thing saying ten years has not been wasted. I haven't done too badly, have I?"

In the decade since Crowe last wielded a sword in anger in these woods, he has been busy constructing as impressive a body of work as any contemporary film actor can boast. Crowe was already a major star when he signed up for the role of Maximus, the first in what would be an exceptionally profitable ongoing collaboration between leading man and director, of which Robin Hood is the fifth product, the others beingA Good Year (2006), American Gangster (2007) andBody Of Lies (2008).

Having made a name for himself in Australia, his international breakthrough came in 1997, with Curtis Hanson's terrific Fifties-set noir LA Confidential. Then, in 1999, Crowe confirmed his potential with his revelatory performance as the chubby corporate whistleblower, Jeffrey Wigand, in The Insider.

But it's Gladiator that made him, at 36, one of cinema's very exclusive club of major players. The film won five Oscars - including Best Actor for Crowe - and took almost half a billion dollars at the box office. It reinvigorated a genre, the sword and sandals epic, that was thought to have become extinct, and reintroduced the idea of a star with brains and brawn, the sort of heavyweight but also introspective action star that Hollywood was supposed to have stopped producing in the Seventies.

As if to prove his versatility, the year after Gladiator Crowe was Oscar nominated for Best Actor again, this time for a very different performance, as the schizophrenic maths genius John Nash in A Beautiful Mind.

Since then, Crowe has played a methodical cop who gets his man in American Gangster and an impoverished boxer who overcame the odds inCinderella Man. He's transformed his body from a muscular, mast-climbing ship's captain for Master And Commander to a bloated journalist in State Of Play. He is, indisputably, among the very finest screen actors working today - a committed, wholehearted performer with a remarkable emotional range.

And yet, despite my admiration for him, I'm nervous about our meeting. It is a considerable understatement to say that Crowe has been given a hard time by the press. A hard-drinking, tough-talking, combative caricature has grown up around him, partly fuelled by his convincing portrayal of violent characters and partly because of two unhappy incidents, both of which made headlines around the world: his falling out with a television producer at the BAFTAs in 2002; and an altercation with a New York hotel concierge in 2005.

What strikes me, on meeting Crowe, is how much has been made of his supposed exoticism. Sure, if you're a teetotal, macrobiotic, uptight Californian you're going to find his no-nonsense bloke-ness tricky. The rest of us can get on with him perfectly well. A man who drinks, smokes, swears, sings songs, likes sport, used to chase women and speaks his mind? In Hollywood that makes you stick out. In Sydney (or in Surrey, for that matter) it makes you pretty unexceptional.

The Crowe I meet is by no means unfriendly, but he is understandably keen that he's not misinterpreted or misrepresented. When he wants to get his point across he stares intently at me, all cobalt-blue eyes and furrowed brow.

"People build this thing that isn't real," he says of his public persona. "They take the smallest, tiniest increment of truth and expand it to some other place. They still do it here in the newspapers. I am always described as 'Hollywood Hard Man'. It's just ridiculous. I know some hard men, mate, and I am not a hard man. I'm a guy who likes poetry, who writes songs. I put on make-up for a living. Give me a break. If I was a hard man, I wouldn't be any good at my job." Pause. "That's assuming that I am good at my job."

He resents the hell-raiser tag, as well as the hard-man misnomer. Crowe has worked with a bona fide hell-raiser, and he wasn't impressed. "I never got on with Ollie [Reed]," he says of his Gladiator co-star, who died during the making of the film. "He has visited me in dreams and asked me to talk kindly of him. So I should... but we never had a pleasant conversation."

Crowe witnessed Reed at his worst. "I have seen him walk down the street in Malta drunk as a lord and just hit anybody he got near to - even a man walking with his children. I just found that to be... not impressive." He wants to take the romance out of Reed's debauchery. "He drank himself to death. He sat on a bar stool until he fell off it and carried on drinking... Lying in his own piss and vomit he continued to drink till he passed out. What did the tabloids estimate he'd had on the day he died? Something like 30 beers, eight or ten dark rums and half a bottle of whisky. In the end, he created such a weird energy around him that no one drinking with him cared."

Crowe resents the fact that he has been tarred with a similar brush. "People try to hang the hell-raiser bullshit on me but it could not be further from the reality. I have a few nights, as everyone does. And there was certainly a period of time where the impact of fame was something I railed against. I am over that now. I don't know anybody who gets  impacted with the Zeitgeist and that level of fame who handles it well."

He pauses, sighs deeply, swears, takes another drag on his cigarette and corrects another common misconception. "How many times have you read that I punch photographers? I have never punched a photographer. But I have thrown some of the sharpest intellectual barbs in my life at guys who are chasing me down the street with a camera. I cut them to the quick. They're lucky to get home with any blood in their system emotionally. And they hate me for it. I'm not sorry."

Crowe then says something that reveals his own perception of his relationship with the media. "You think it's OK for me to be fair game. I'm a puppy in a barrel. And you've got a shotgun. I've got no way of getting out of this barrel. And you're going to keep firing. So the only thing I can do is use words and that is the natural instinct: to fight. And it's only ever been words."

Not that there haven't been times when Crowe has felt the warmth of the spotlight. "I liked being famous after LA Confidential because all the doormen, head waiters and sommeliers knew who you were. It was really easy to be famous then. But then it got bigger and uncontrollable. Then it became acutely uncomfortable for a couple of years." He has developed coping mechanisms. "You can make yourself less interesting. You can wear the same clothes everywhere. And you don't go to all the things that you might want to go to - certain plays, things like that. These things you have to learn because there's no book."

Crowe was born in Wellington, New Zealand but his family moved to Sydney when he was four. A mongrel mix of Welsh, Scottish, Norwegian and Maori extraction, he comes from a film-making family. His maternal grandfather, Stan Wemyss, was a WWII cinematographer who was awarded an MBE in 1947 (54 years later, Crowe would wear his medal to collect his Oscar) and both Crowe's parents worked as on-set caterers, which is how seven-year-old Russell first appeared on screen, as an orphan in a war drama called Spyforce.

Between the age of four and 14, the family moved house ten times, with Crowe attending nine different schools. Along the way he picked up a guitar, took up smoking and then moved with his family back to New Zealand, where his father attempted to turn round the fortunes of a clutch of rough pubs, including one dubbed "the Flying Jug", for obvious reasons.

Despite this peripatetic existence, one of the things that remained constant throughout Crowe's life was a love of sport. His cousins, Martin and Jeff, were both New Zealand cricket captains, and sport provided formative experiences. When I ask him what advice he'd give his younger self, he tells me a story about one particular game of schoolboy rugby against a "vastly inferior team" in which the opposition coach cheated. He's clearly still annoyed about this. "He was in charge but he was teaching me life was full of bullshit. People are going to put you in a negative position if you aren't bold enough. Are you going to call them on the bullshit? Or are you going to be a wallflower and let life smack you in the face? I would never advise my younger self, or my children, or my friends to let life smack them in the face."

It doesn't seem to matter that Crowe's rugby team won the game anyway.

Although he harboured sporting and musical ambitions Crowe eventually settled on becoming an actor. "Acting was easy," he says. "I could then earn money to write my songs." He served his apprenticeship as a young actor, chalking up 415 performances in a touring production of The Rocky Horror Show as well as the requisite soap work (he played a darts hustler called Kenny Larkin on Neighbours). By the time he reached LA he had starred in lead roles in seven feature films. "Definitely not one swallow, mate."

After a while, Crowe breaks off our conversation: "I'll just get us some beer." He limps to the end of the trailer, sticks his head out of the door into the rain and delivers a blast. "Can I get a couple of Guinness? I'm just speaking to some fackin journalist. I'll be finished in a moment. Don't fackin leave."

"There's none left," comes the reply.

"Oh, do fuck off," Crowe retorts. "Get off your arse, one of you bastards. Get us a cripple of beer."

He comes back, softly spoken again, apologetically saying: "Just the boys from the battle."

The first anyone outside of Hollywood heard aboutRobin Hood was when Ridley Scott discussed the film with MTV in 2007. The pitch was for a dramatically revisionist history, with Crowe playing the Sheriff of Nottingham. Although keen not to damn the original writers, Crowe felt that that original take was rather too "CSI Sherwood Forest".

Still, after three script rewrites, there are some radical revisions to the traditional tale. "Our take is that King Richard dies in the opening sequence. That will be a very clear signal to everybody who has come to seeRobin Hood that this is not going to be the Robin Hood you expected."

The key relationship in the creation of the film is clearly that between Ridley Scott and Crowe. Ask the latter what Scott gives him and Crowe mock kvetches "Ulcers!" He refutes reports that he and Scott had been in violent disagreement on set. "It's a common misconception, but we never argue - he's non-confrontational. He wants the best fucking idea and he wants it now. He said to me when we first met: 'If you tell me in post- production a good idea that you sat on, I will hate you forever. I want all your ideas while I can do something about it.'" He pauses for effect. "And he's probably regretted saying that so often."

Crowe is sensitive to the fact that Robin Hood will be compared to Gladiator. "Ridley and I are very highly aware that we dodged the proverbial bullet with [Gladiator]. We're also extremely aware that it's a type of alchemy. We're not cocky about what we're doing. We get up every day and try and do something special. Simple as that."

He likes to present the pair of them as simply getting on with the task at hand. "At the end of the day, all Ridley wants to do is paint the canvas. If you give him all the bits and pieces and don't get between the paint and the canvas, you're going to be fine."

One suspects, however, that there is one person who can be in that space: Crowe himself. Certainly on Gladiator Crowe spent much of his time on set fighting the producers on various grounds, including why Maximus shouldn't have a sex scene, why he had to die and, crucially, whether this "Spaniard" should actually have a Spanish accent.

Filming in three countries with a script that was constantly being rewritten, from what I've read making Gladiator sounds like a nightmare. Crowe, however, describes it as "an adventure with a great film-maker. It was chaotic for those who think film is static. But it's just not. A lot of the things that people took away and repeat - 'strength and honour' and so on - just came up in the moment. Film is not the thing it is reported as. We're gypsies, mate. It's a fucking circus."

For the first time in his work with Scott, Crowe has been made producer on Robin Hood. "It just gives them someone else to blame," he explains with a grin. But anyone who doubts that Crowe is involved to the nth degree in every aspect of this film's creation need only hear his satisfaction in reporting that they're five days ahead on shooting and £7m below budget. He's involved in everything - from the prop rabbit parts for the Merry Men's provisions, to the wrap-party presents (he tells me there is an actual Robin Hood hoodie). The rain intensifies. "I've got all these people outside. And you're not drinking your beer. This is a bad sign..."

Crowe is a dedicated film-maker, but his career is not the only thing in his life. Like many of us, Crowe has hobbies. His musical career is part of the Russell Crowe story that people mock most readily, beginning with his debut rockabilly release, "I Want To Be Like Marlon Brando" under the stage name Russ Le Roq, aged 17, and continuing with his touring rock band, first called 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts, now the Ordinary Fear Of God.

At one point, he had the opportunity to make his music more than a hobby. "Contract on the table with Sony, sitting there with Tommy Mottola saying to me, 'Ya gotta be with Sony. We don't take "no" for an answer. And we drink blood.'" Crowe turned him down. But Mottola isn't the only one to see potential in Crowe'swork. "Billy Bragg, Sting, Elvis Costello - those guys say, 'You're a songwriter.' I got a song on a record in Canada that went gold. It might not be significant to somebody else but it works for me..."

Given his love of music, I wonder if, in some way, this recognition of his band meant as much to him as the Oscar? The brows go up. "A gold record from Canada? No. Definitely no. The Oscar, mate, that's a fucking once in a lifetime. You cannot possibly imagine how complex it is for one person to go through that and come out the end with a gold statuette."

Crowe realises he needs to rejoin the crew. "I really should be sitting out in the rain with those guys, because they're probably thinking I'm a bastard. If you want to have a second conversation that's totally fine." He says I can stay for a drink if I like, and steps outside to a rowdy chorus of approval. He clearly enjoys hanging out with cast members both past and present. At one recent gathering 20 cast and crew from Master And Commander came to visit - according to Crowe, every one of them called him "Captain" at one point.

Tonight there's no such formality. They'll drink Australian Victoria Bitter. He'll drink more Guinness. They'll listen to Motown records. He'll reminisce and smoke. This is anything but an ego trip. Crowe's not even got the best seat in the circle - that honour goes to Charlie "Chick" Allan, the vast bearded berserker who holds a Roman head aloft at the start of Gladiator.Crowe settles down and sparks up. He asks someone for an arrow ("Not blunt tipped. Get a good one") and presents it to me. He then proceeds to introduce me to everyone - I shake hands with 20 people and forget 20 names. Crowe sits back. An awkward pause. "Go on, Andy," he says with a grin, "socialise."

Weeks pass before I am invited on set again, this time to Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire. In the time between our interviews Crowe has been busy. He successfully approached rugby league side Bradford Bulls' forward Sam Burgess to play for the Rabbitohs. He appeared in the commentary box at Lord's and charmed Jonathan Agnew ("Russell, you strike me as a ferocious hitter..." "I'm much more of a bowler actually"). He has also been in the papers presenting a donation of £1,000 to a charity shop and, according to certain  tabloid reports, has been barred from a local pub for trying to bribe his way into having a lock-in.

At Pinewood Studios I'm ferried via 4x4, past a home-made sign for the "Merry Men Field Hospital" and into the woods. The scene is a simple one - Robin and his Merry Men cross a small brook, make camp and discuss their next move. The casting director has done her job: Will Scarlett is a redhead, Little John stands 6'7". What's slightly surreal is that the forest is still open to the public. While Crowe is performing in close-up, less than 30 feet away in the background you can see a family taking their Dalmatian for a walk.

"I'll take Andy back," he informs the on-set publicist, sitting in the driving seat of his Gator. Crowe's in his full Robin Hood get-up and still has dried blood on the side of his face. As the engine starts I begin making small talk. Crowe turns and says, "Have you got your little recorder?"

No matter what we discuss over the next three hours,Crowe's mood doesn't darken. The volume of his voice never heightens, and he swears only for emphasis. There's still no mistaking his background. He uses "G'day" at one point, "sweet as a biscuit" at another and methodically collects his cigarette butts for disposal later: some Australian bush habits clearly die hard.

Today he is keen to tell some stories. He rattles off the voice mails that James Ellroy used to leave on his answering machine during LA Confidential (one began, "Woof-woof, hear the demon dog bark/He's got a 12-inch wanger and it glows in the dark"). He talks about how, aged ten, he would concoct elaborate prank calls. "I'd be pretending to be a radio DJ, telling people they had won a prize. We'd tell them they had won a week in Vanuatu but they had to get there by canoe." Later on in life, at the height of his fame, he had someone play prank calls on him: Michael Jackson. "A gruff voice would say something was wrong, then this tiny little voice said, 'Don't worry. This is Michael.'" Much to his wife's disappointment, Crowe never took Jackson up on his offer of a trip to Neverland.

As a raconteur Crowe takes some beating. At times such as these you can see why Richard Harris became friends with him. The veteran British actor took to him during filming on Gladiator, saying on their first meeting: "You're a good night out in one man, Crowe. I think I'm going to like you." The pair would drink Guinness in the Toucan, a tiny pub in London's Soho, and discuss actors they admired (Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton), actors they didn't (Harris didn't get on well with Ollie Reed either). They also discussed poetry. "[Richard] famously got me in trouble at the BAFTAs, which he just thought was a hoot," says Crowe. This was the night, in 2002 when Crowe, after winning a BAFTA for A Beautiful Mind, delivered a short, four-line poem by Patrick Kavanagh. When he discovered later that night that the poem had been cut from the television broadcast, Crowe flew into a rage at TV producer Malcolm Gerrie at the aftershow party.  He subsequently apologised, but the damage to his reputation was done.

Greg Williams

"Richard thought it was the best thing to happen for years," says Crowe. "The only thing that disappointed him was that I didn't hit anyone." I point out that Crowe did come close. "I did get to give [Gerrie] a good single poke in the chest." Crowe explains that he hadn't expected to win, had had a few drinks and was in a "funky netherworld" of jet lag. He was also irritated that the organisers had cut his thank-yous to John and Alicia Nash - but he isn't offering excuses. "It was ultimately a badly delivered speech, so I can't blame the editor completely," he laughs, "but they should have been more sensitive to the subject matter. Who cares? It's no significant thing at all really."

I ask him if it bothers him that people keep bringing it up. "No one's brought it up for years," he says. "This is all about you." He holds my gaze stone-faced for slightly too long and then smiles.

Crowe is keen to set the record straight on a couple of things that have come up since we last spoke. The fact that his charity donation made the papers annoyed him. "I don't want to rag on the UK Cancer Council," he says, laughing at how preposterous that sounds, "but I don't like being used." He simply wanted to give money to a "righteous charity" after seeing their advertising campaign.

Another article annoyed him more. "What about the one where I got banned from a pub I've never been to?" He was dismayed when the story broke worldwide. "I was getting all these e-mails saying, 'I hope you told that pub manager where to stick it.'" He feels that the lack of care in reporting is typical. "How hard is it for the guy at the Sunday Express to find the truth? But you ring the paper and they start to play games." The newspaper eventually issued a retraction 21 days after publication, explaining that not only did the specific incident not take place, but "Mr Crowe has not been banned, ejected or asked to leave any pub in Windlesham, Surrey or anywhere else in the UK".

Crowe, for his part, seems to be taking it all in good humour. "They think they're clever... but they will laugh differently when [adopts the tone of James Ellroy] 'the Devil is fucking them in the ass!'" He giggles. He points out something he's learnt from more than a decade of dealing with the tabloid press. "If you've been in this business a while you'll know that the "no smoke without fire" thing does not mean shit. Guys sit around and try to interpret the expression in a photo. Record reviewers base it on the cover. We got all these reviews as a heavy metal band... and   we were playing folk harmonies!" What becomes clear during our conversation is that even on potentially contentious topics, Crowe is not above a degree of self-mockery. "That is a very important thing, mate. The miles of articles you'll read saying, 'He's so serious blah de blah.'"

How did he feel about Kirk Lazarus, the preposterous, self-aggrandising Australian actor played by Robert Downey Jr in Tropic Thunder? Crowe smiles broadly. "A hell of a performance," he says with conviction. "It has nothing to do with me. Robert can't do the Irish accent that was in the script, so he used an Aussie accent. He did the same trick in Natural Born Killers."

Between films, Crowe retreats home to Australia. He once said he'd only move to LA "if Australia and New Zealand were swallowed by a huge tidal wave, if there was a bubonic plague in Europe and if the continent of Africa disappeared from some Martian attack". His base is a working farm a 45-minute flight from Sydney and has everything he needs, including a cricket pitch, a home recording studio and even a Byzantine-style chapel in which his children were christened.

"It's the greatest decompression thing in the world. It works as an antidote to the people-intensive job I have. Nobody calling out your name. Nobody saying, 'I know you hate this but...' You can wear daggy shorts, scruffy boots, get your hands covered in shit..." Despite the wildlife and the occasional luxurious touches, he doesn't want people to get the wrong idea, though. "People say it's paradise. But it's very simple, man. It's just a farm..."

Slowly but surely, Crowe no longer seems quite so fearsome. "In reality actors are not intimidating. Actors are naturally garrulous. All the great actors I know play instruments." The only times Crowe can recall encountering really intimidating figures are Anthony Hopkins, on the set of factory drama Spotswood, and the Australian actress Helen Morse who, upon meeting the actor said simply, "So you're that Russell Crowe thing?"

Crowe loves talking about films. He says Thelma & Louise is his favourite Ridley Scott film because "the ending shocked the shit out of people". He talks of the purity of Marlon Brando's role in On The Waterfront, the power of Kevin Spacey's death scene in LA Confidential. His joy at working with William Hurt on Robin Hood and being given a chance to thank him for The Big Chill, a video Crowe rented 13 times upon its release. How the marketing nearly sank Master And Commander and how the sequel only has a two and a half page treatment, not a full script. How Crowe didn't watch the legions of sword and sandals epics that followed Gladiator, even though he was asked to appear in 300, Troy and Alexander. How Quentin Tarantino is terrific fun to talk to but Crowe never fully believes in the worlds the director creates. How his version of Shakespeare In Love would have seen the bard become a bigger drinker. How funny Sarah Silverman is and how she died an ugly death at the wrap party for A Beautiful Mind. How Crowe was offered a role in 2009's Star Trek but chose not to take it.

It's been lurking in the background, so finally we discuss the phone incident in New York. It's a footnote in the Crowe story. It feels almost churlish to bring it up. "My story has never fucking changed," he says. "I defy anyone to be in that situation and not to have a simple human response."

Crowe explains that day had been spent flying to London for three hours and then flying back. He wanted to speak to his children. He had a few drinks. "Of course I should not have responded that way but if you are asking someone [to do] something you know that they can do..." The concierge told Crowe, "Whatever," and hung up on him.

"I think it was a pretty unreasonable response considering I was spending in the region of $15,400 a day for the eleven rooms in that hotel." He collects himself. "It was a dumb response. I can beat myself up for it and I can be regretful. Which I am. But do I understand myself - yes I do." He looks faintly disappointed in me. "You know I would be happy never to speak about that again in my life..." I wonder whether I've blown it completely. But then it all comes back. "All you can do is shrug your shoulders and say that it was bound to happen - as the Americans would say: the perfect storm." He pauses. "Have you noticed in America everything is the perfect storm?" He smiles and starts giving a lively example in a Yank accent. "This breakfast is the perfect storm - I got my eggs, my sausages..."

And we're done. "I've got to get back to real life now," says Crowe. He's very gracious ("Fuck, you can ask a question!") and heads off cheerily into the Buckinghamshire night to look for the remaining Merry Men.

Crowe's battles with the press have left him sore and quick to take offence - two weeks after our interview he challenges a journalist who mocks his fitness regime to a bike race - but his strength of character persists. He will remain a Hollywood outsider no matter how famous he becomes simply because of his refusal to toe the line.

A garrulous whirlwind of emotion and intellect, Crowe is also a no-nonsense alpha male who is fiercely loyal to his friends and family. He makes mistakes and is fallible - he admits this, which makes him stronger. As we part company, he sees my coat is soaked through from the rain. He instructs me to another trailer where "someone will give you something to wear". I travel home in a South Sydney Rabbitohs top.  

Originally published in the June 2010 issue of British GQ. Read the original (plus a guide to Crowe's best performances) here.