Quotes of the Day

The first glimpse I had of what Russell Crowe's friends call Crowe's "intensity" was on the green waves of Sydney Harbor. In advance of our meeting, Crowe's publicist announced that her client had a surprise for me: he had rented a tall ship—like the one he captains in his new movie, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World—for the sake of a photo shoot and our introductory chat. It seemed a bit obvious—ship movie, ship interview—and I wondered if it wasn't a clumsy gesture designed to focus the conversation on knots and fathoms rather than more interesting matters like bar brawls and love affairs. But soon there were other surprises to ponder.

As we toddled into the harbor aboard the Svanen, a 120-ft. oak beauty, Crowe was nowhere to be found, and our crew became suspiciously quiet. Once we were past the commuter ferries and tourist boats, the Svanen's engine yawned, and I was told to look toward land.

Squinting, I could just make out two shapes bobbing on the waves. One was a woman; the other was Crowe. "This is the real surprise!" said Crowe's publicist. "He's kayaking out to meet you with his personal trainer!" I was surprised, or rather, confused. Was I supposed to be impressed that he could kayak? Or swept away by the strange, albeit larger-than-life gesture?

I was still stumped when Crowe scaled the ship's ladder, grumbled something to the photographer who had been taking pictures of his approach and disappeared into the hold. "He told me to f___ off," said the photographer nervously. "I was breaking his concentration." Ten minutes later, Crowe emerged, having changed into loose-fitting Levi's and a dark sweater. He posed for a few more pictures and waved grandly to a boat across the way, joking, "My service to Australian tourism." Then he grabbed a bag of Doritos and sat down cross-legged for a chat about rugby. He was smart, funny and spontaneous. With his hair cut short, a week's worth of growth crowding his round face and his chubby hand digging in the chip bag, he looked like a very comfortable bear. After a while, Crowe suggested we paddle back to his apartment on the Woolloomooloo wharf. Moments later, the two of us were slicing through the waves. "I've got a wet ass," he shouted across the water.

It was an odd day.

This, in microcosm, is what Crowe has been doing to moviegoers since his breakout performance in 1997's L.A. Confidential. He jerks them around with surliness, then seduces them with immense talent and charm. "Russell is very unpredictable," says Master director Peter Weir. "In life and on the screen you're never quite sure what he's going to do in any situation. It keeps you watching." Says Ron Howard, Crowe's friend and the director of 2001's A Beautiful Mind: "He's a pretty intense guy. And he is definitely, uh, well, the mood can shift on you—I'll put it that way."

At 39, Crowe is a three-time Academy Award nominee (he won Best Actor for 2000's Gladiator). He is not yet the biggest box-office draw on the planet (that's Tom Cruise), but he has jumped Cruise and Tom Hanks in many directors' casting wish lists. "He gets offered everything—or everything good—first," says an agent. (Crowe turned down the Hugh Grant part in About a Boy, the Laurence Fishburne part in The Matrix and Viggo Mortensen's role in The Lord of the Rings, among others.) But where Hanks and Cruise insinuated their way into moviegoers' hearts by exuding amiability on- and offscreen, Crowe has pulled off a far more unlikely trick: he is one of the world's biggest stars and is frequently perceived as one of the world's biggest jerks.

Much of the negativity stems from an insane gauntlet Crowe ran at the onset of fame, when, in short order, he had to deal with a highly publicized affair with Meg Ryan; rumored (and denied) trysts with Courtney Love, Jodie Foster, Nicole Kidman and Sarah Ferguson; countless apparent losses of temper; and a kidnapping threat serious enough that he needed a dozen security escorts with him on the night he won his Oscar. Crowe did not handle any of this particularly well. Instead of expressing amused bewilderment at the peculiarity of fame—a strategy Colin Farrell has perfected—he was defiant, his Maximusian scowl declaring "How dare you be intrigued by me, ungrateful rabbling dogs!" Soon he was being parodied as a great marauding sourpuss on South Park.

Crowe's life is now significantly calmer. In the study of his vast apartment, where we lunch on calamari and ginger beer, there is a picture of Danielle Spencer, the Australian singer and actress he married this past April. Spencer is pregnant with Crowe's first child, a son, due in January. I ask if domesticity has calmed him, and he raises a hand: Eat, then interview.

When lunch is over, he says, "I'm sure regardless of my marriage and impending fatherhood, certain things shift just because of age." One of those things is that he no longer goes out to bars simply to prove that he is not too famous to go out to bars. "I am a famous actor," he says with the grim acceptance of a recovering addict.

Crowe has been working as an actor since age 6, when his father, a hotel manager and film-set caterer, got him a job on a TV show. "I didn't work continuously when I was a young fella, just little bits and pieces," he says, "enough to formulate the desire. And I was never a child star, just a child extra, so I was learning and observing without pressure." After school, Crowe wanted to attend college to study history. But his father was out of work, so instead he hit the market and got jobs in repertory productions of Grease and The Rocky Horror Picture Show and sang in a moderately successful band, Roman Antix. After enduring the usual amateur lows—including a job as the star of a Seventh-Day Adventist in-house video—he caught his first big break at 25, when he was cast in a low-budget film, The Crossing. The director, George Ogilvie, says he asked Crowe which role he wanted to play. "All of them," Crowe responded.

Acting for Crowe is the synthesis of two passions: he loves performing, and he also approaches each role as a chance to design his own curriculum and make up for his lost higher education. To play Master and Commander's Jack Aubrey, he spent months learning the violin and studying the linguistic origins of his character's accent. "But the vast majority of it is reading," he says, guiding me to a sagging bookcase. "You've got Sailing for Dummies ..." He laughs, but there it is, next to several dozen more sophisticated volumes on naval history, one of which—Nelson: Love & Fame, by Edgar Vincent—is almost in tatters. Admiral Nelson is mentioned only briefly in the film, yet Crowe highlighted and Post-it-noted the text like a grad student. "I wanted to have an intimate knowledge about Nelson," he says. "I wanted to feel the sense of him, because Jack served with him as a very young man, at least that's the legend of the fictitious character. None of this research is a burden," he adds. "I'm just inquisitive."

Crowe is not a Method actor ("I work between 'Action!' and 'Cut!'"), but he does take his preparatory obsessiveness to the set. On the first day of Master and Commander, he handed out three shirts to each cast member and ordered them to return in 24 hours with name tags sewn on them as a way of getting them used to taking orders from him. "It was kind of done with a wink," says co-star Billy Boyd, who plays a coxswain. "Kind of not, too." Crowe says he does this kind of thing a lot and that it is part of his "work on behalf of the character," but some directors have complained about his free-lancing. "On A Beautiful Mind he was intensely adamant about expressing himself and trying his ideas, and if you tried to squelch them he'd resent the hell out of it," says Howard, who will work with Crowe again on next year's The Cinderella Man, a boxing movie. "But early on he said something like, 'Look, don't get caught in my vortex of darkness. I am moody, and I may get dark, but do your job. Direct me. I'm here to serve the movie.' And he gave me 110% on my choices. He'd say, 'I don't buy it, Ron. You'll hate this in the editing room.' But he'd nail it."

Peter Weir, who directed Harrison Ford in Witness and The Mosquito Coast, and Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, admits to being fascinated and a bit frustrated by his leading man: "One evening when we'd just had a spectacular week of dailies, I looked over at him and said, 'How do you do it?' And he shot back, 'I don't know. How do you?' That's about as deep as we got. I think I knew Jack Aubrey better than I knew Russell Crowe."

Audiences are frequently left with the same impression. Crowe enjoys the trappings of celebrity: he has had nights out in Brisbane with Bruce Springsteen, dinner parties in London with Emma Thompson and a series of odd phone calls from Michael Jackson. ("He used to put on these funny voices and then giggle, 'Oh, Russell, it's Michael.'") But Crowe has yet to fully make his peace with being famous. "I think in a lot of ways I'm my own worst enemy, because I won't answer simple questions," he says. "And it's not because I'm arrogant necessarily—though I know now that if I say, 'These questions are tedious,' it will indicate that I am arrogant—but there's just some things that I think run counter to the whole gig that I'm doing. As far as I'm concerned, the reality of Russell Crowe should be vanilla, and the viewer can add whatever it is they need to make it work for them."

This is a wise strategy if the goal is a diverse career. Hanks, Cruise and ladies' champ Julia Roberts are the gracious wits audiences like to imagine themselves as, but they are also prisoners of their own goodwill, condemned to deliver endless variations on the same performance. Crowe can play anything because he has conditioned audiences to expect anything. He is smart enough to possibly be given credit for premeditating this eremitic media strategy; he is also obstreperous enough simply to hate having his privacy invaded. Either way, Crowe's desire not to be known reads as petulance, and that, as much as anything, feeds his jerky image. It's not as though he never considered the possibility that he might become a movie star, right?

"You know, I got in trouble a while ago when I said, 'Look, I don't want to be one of your movie stars.' I quoted Sinatra: 'I owe you my best work, but I don't owe you the time of day,' which is"—he pauses—"not exactly how I feel. But there is some merit in that. Let me just do my work. I just do the work. I'll make movies, and you go to the cinema. Why can't we just keep it at that?"

Recognizing that he has to give up something about himself, Crowe sometimes offers a true, if somewhat diversionary, narrative: Russell Crowe, simple bloke. Asked what advice he would give to an actor playing him, he says, "I'd tell them to get another job. It wouldn't be worth doing. I'm very boring." It must be said that Crowe's normal-guy credentials are impeccable. He loves rugby, throwing back a pint and working on his 800-acre farm near Coffs Harbor, six hours north of Sydney. He also loves playing with his band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. The actor-band is an unfortunate cliche of celebrity culture, but TOFOG, as Crowe's group is known, existed well before its lead singer became a household name. (Crowe and guitarist Dean Cochran have been playing together since their teens.) Nevertheless, the six-man group, essentially a very good bar band, has become an easy target and now exists almost in spite of Crowe's fame. "The vast majority of people who talk about us have never even heard us," says TOFOG drummer Dave Kelly. "'Russell Crowe's band? I heard they suck.' It's frustrating. But Russell's always been in the band. We can't imagine it any other way."

Nor can Crowe. He's a good singer, and he savors the every-dude camaraderie shown on the band's DVD, Texas, in which the members of TOFOG drink, fart and strum their way through the Lone Star State. But TOFOG is not Crowe's reality so much as his escape from reality. "The subject of his celebrity never really comes up," says Kelly. "Like that kidnapping thing: I don't think we found out about it until we heard about it on the news. He tends to keep those kinds of troubles to himself."

While his screen characters are magnificently nuanced, Crowe seems paralyzed by the thought of integrating his various selves into an honest public persona. "It is strange," says Weir. "Just when you think you see him as a kind of an Aussie simple man—you know, what you see is what you get—there'll be a flash from those eyes, he'll say something penetrating or precise, and you'll remember that he is a savant of some kind. It reminds you how little you know the man."

On the second day of our acquaintance, Crowe pulled some strings and arranged for us to chat on the stage of Sydney's famed Opera House. It was a grand and generous gesture—a movie-star gesture—but like the boat and kayak it seemed designed to simultaneously impress, overwhelm and create some distance. Still, Crowe was interested in discussing how the game of celebrity hide-and-seek is played by others. Staring at the acoustical tiles he asked me, "Do you ever ask, when you're doing interviews with musicians, the what-are-your-influences question?" I do. "Because it's one of the most tedious questions to have to answer." He caught his tone and changed it. "It's just the funniest question, because you're supposed to take it seriously, but music is influenced by many other things. It's just such a gigantic question. I've never found a satisfactorily glib answer that can deal with it and put it away."

Outside, a phalanx of paparazzi had gathered. With Nicole Kidman living in New York City, Crowe is the biggest local meal ticket, and long lenses follow his every move. Gamely, he tried to affect the air of a man enduring a comic nuisance, like birds he just can't seem to shoo off his lawn. He didn't quite pull it off. "I really try not to think about these f______ c__ks," he said while settling in for a coffee at an outdoor cafe. "We could go, but they've already got me. I should—no, I won't. There's been too many photographs of me giving people the finger."

Inevitably the conversation turns to the fact that a lot of people are interested in seeing photos of him sipping a macchiato and that there are worse problems in the world. "Yes, you've got to be philosophical about it to a certain degree," he says. "You can bang your head against the wall for a long time, but it feels really good when you stop." Then he heard a shutter click—"Oh, this one thinks he's being sneaky, f______ c__k!"—and the mood shifted. "But should I be hounded because I don't see it's my gig to live up to what I do on the screen? I mean, that's what a lot of people hound me for, right? Because I won't become an icon or a block of wood and behave at all times like a movie star." Then: "I think the most interesting thing about Daniel Day-Lewis is that he's strong enough as a man to say, 'Uh, I'm not going to make a movie for a few years. Let all this die away.'"

Crowe admits he's not strong enough—or loves acting too much—to let it all die away. And there is a middle ground between being a block of wood and disappearing. But until Crowe finds it, he'll be stuck paddling out to amiability, and telling it to ... you know.

• Josh Tyrangiel