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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."