Russell Crowe Fires Back Against Bombed Audition Allegation
Russell Crowe took to Twitter to deny claims that he bombed a table read for My Best Friend's Wedding, asserting that he never auditioned for a role.
A week ago, Academy Award-winning actor Russell Crowe was dominating Netflix, with his 2010 action flick Robin Hood cracking the streamer’s top ten most streamed movies. This week, the actor is defending a claim by My Best Friend’s Wedding director, P.J. Hogan, that he bombed an audition for the 1997 romantic comedy. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the 58-year-old actor took to Twitter to address Hogan’s allegations against him in which the filmmaker referred to his audition as “one of the worst table reads I’ve ever experienced.”
In his tweet, Russell Crowe is adamant that the audition P.J. Hogan is referring to never took place. He declares the director imagined the table read and asserts that he never auditioned for a role in My Best Friend’s Wedding. Going further, the Gladiator star insists he’s never done a table read with the actress mentioned (Julia Roberts).
Hogan’s quote regarding the actor’s audition comes from the book From Hollywood with Love, where he told author Scott Meslow that Russell Crowe, a rising star at the time, wasn’t right for the film. The filmmaker’s statements made headlines following the publication of an excerpt from the book by Vulture back in February, which Crowe didn’t learn about until recently. The director proclaimed that Crowe was his first pick to portray the character of Michael, but he knew following the table read the actor would not be appearing in My Best Friend’s Wedding.
Whether or not the audition Hogan is referring to actually took place, it hasn’t stopped Russell Crowe from becoming one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. In 1997, the year My Best Friend’s Wedding was released, the actor landed a starring role in the hit thriller L.A. Confidential, which grossed $126 million at the worldwide box office. The same year, he headlined the romantic comedy Breaking Up, appearing alongside Salma Hayek, and the action thriller Heaven’s Burning.
Russell Crowe has remained a prominent talent in the film industry over the last twenty-five years. He’s received three Oscar nominations for Best Actor for his performances in A Beautiful Mind, The Inside Man, and Gladiator, for which he took home the golden statue. A sequel to the Ridley Scott-directed flick, in which Crowe portrays the character Maximus, is reportedly in development, but no cast members have been announced.
Recently, Russell Crowe became one of just a handful of actors to appear in both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe. He first portrayed Kal-El’s (aka Superman) father in Zack Snyder’s 2013 superhero flick Man of Steel, and he later returned to do voicework for the character in the director’s four-hour version of Justice League, which was recently reported to finally be getting a big screen release. In this year’s Thor: Love and Thunder, he played Zeus, and he’s also set to star in an unspecified role in another Marvel feature, Kraven the Hunter, which is currently filming and scheduled to release in 2023.
Up next for the New Zealand-born star is The Georgetown Project, which centers on a troubled actor who begins to unravel while shooting a horror film. Other upcoming projects for Russell Crowe include The Pope’s Exorcist, Sleeping Dogs, Rothko, and American Son. With so many motion pictures in the works, it’s clearly going to take more than one alleged failed audition to bring the Oscar-winning actor down.
