Russell Crowe shares his career’s bizarre extremes—from a tarantula "fucking" him in Miss Shumway Waves a Wand to near-collapse in freezing Icelandic water for NOAA—while rejecting factory farming’s ethics, favoring regenerative practices on his 220-cattle New Zealand farm. His fight scenes in Cinderella Man (improvised with Troy, a Canadian Olympian) and research into ancient flood myths like Gilgamesh contrast with modern misinformation, which he criticizes alongside Rogan for eroding free speech and community. Crowe’s journey—from childhood acting to quitting smoking, aging parents, and political disillusionment—culminates in a plea for America to uphold freedom as a global necessity, praising Rogan’s platform for fostering open-mindedness. [Automatically generated summary]
When I meet somebody whose work I dig or whatever, I'm still just the same fan that I was before I even got into the business.
I met Daniel Day-Lewis in a Motel 8 in Canistoga, New York State.
A guy saw us and he said, You know, do you mind if I take your photograph?
So we went out into the car park of this motel aid and this guy took a photograph and about, I don't know, seven or eight months later, A copy of it arrived at my house in Australia, and the guy had basically just written Russell Crowe Australia and sent it to me.
So I have a copy of it, and it's a funny thing, you know, it's like I was there, it was the Boxing Hall of Fame.
I was there with Angelo Dundee, and he was there with Barry McGuigan, yeah.
Yeah, I... If I was to explain to my childhood self, my 10-year-old self, what was in front of me and the people that I would meet and the things that I would experience and the contacts that have come along in my life, my little brain would have just exploded.
There's just no way I could have possibly imagined that this life was going to unfold in front of me.
My first thing when I was leaving school is just don't have a boring life.
Just don't find some way of being able to express yourself.
My first job out of school, my first official job, was working for an insurance company, commercial union insurance, inputting the details of policies.
So after like five or six weeks, they shuffled me off.
And the guy really dug what I was playing and how I got the dance floor moving and everything.
But he says, you know, I need to sell toasted sandwiches, man.
You have to tell people that the kitchen's open.
LAUGHTER So, you know, I left school partway through the last year.
In New Zealand, they have a different thing where you have a bursary year after normal high school finishes, and in your bursary year, if you achieve to a certain degree, you get money towards your university degree, you know?
But it was clear to me in that last year my dad was out of work and I wasn't going to be able to go to university.
We couldn't afford that sort of thing.
It only would have cost three and a half or four grand or something like that back in the day.
But that was beyond our means as a family.
I started working at this insurance company and I was the only person in the building of a big insurance company.
Who had actually passed matriculation into university.
And the general manager of the company sat me down to tell me that one day.
You're the only person with the higher school certificate, what they call university entrance in New Zealand, in the building.
And I just watched this thing unfold.
The coolest dude in the building was this salesman, right?
And he had a beard and he wore kind of cool sunglasses and everything.
And I remember the day he bought a new pair of shoes.
And all the girls in the building, oh, have you seen whatever his name is?
New shoes and all that.
And they were all fluttering over him and stuff like that.
And this guy was the best salesman they had and blah, blah, blah, you know.
And in the time that I was there, I watched those new shoes get age on them and start cracking at the side and stuff like that, you know, because he obviously used them a lot.
Did a lot of walking around talking to people, you know.
And just as I was leaving, I overheard a discussion where he was planning on getting some new shoes again.
And I was like, yeah, I definitely, definitely don't want to...
Did you know of anyone that had made a living doing that?
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I made a movie with him playing his son when I was...
25 or 26, something like that.
I bought a property near where his property is in the bush because he was kind of like a mentor.
I'm still talking about an hour's driveway, but in the bush that's nothing.
And I still know him today and he's in his 80s now.
So I had people like that.
When I was 12 I went to a...
So I did an acting job when I was 6 and another one when I was 8. And then I kind of forgot about it for a while.
And then I went on a school tour of a TV studio.
And it was a TV show called The Young Doctors that was being made in that studio.
And there was a bit part actor, a guy called Roy Harris Jones, who had been on a couple of shows that my parents had done and I liked him a lot and blah blah blah.
I hadn't seen him for years and there he was on that show.
And while the other kids are there going on their tour, He goes, are you here for an audition?
I said, no, I haven't done anything like that for ages.
And he goes, come on, let's go down the corridor and meet the casting director.
So I split away from the tour.
All the other kids go off.
And this is a camera.
This is a control room.
They're doing all that stuff.
And I go down and the casting director had a minute.
So she sat me down and talked to me and all that sort of stuff.
And two weeks later, I was back in that building shooting a character on the TV show.
Wow!
And then that kind of reignited that part of my imagination.
But coming out of school and everything, I really thought that I was simply going to...
I was going to go into music.
That was my thing.
If I was going to pursue anything, it was going to be music.
Basically, I would accept any job that allowed me to be in a position of entertaining people.
So that's why I went into the nightclub thing with being a DJ. And my first night, the second time, because obviously I'd failed the first time around and been fired because I couldn't talk.
The second time around, I'd auditioned for this place, but they hadn't given me the job they gave to somebody else.
But they ended up firing him after two nights because him and the guy that ran the club didn't get on.
So they called me up on a Sunday afternoon and they said, are you free tonight?
Can you come and DJ at the club?
We've got a bunch of 1950s records because it's a 1950s music-only club.
Have you got a turntable?
And I said, I've got one.
So I went in that night with an orange plastic sharp turntable, plugged it in through the headphone socket, And played these records.
But I had one turntable, so I couldn't switch.
So I have to talk.
Because every time a song finishes, I have to pick up the needle, the arm, pick up the record, get the next one, put it down.
It was just a crazy circumstance.
It was created to make sure that I absolutely broke through whatever that fear was immediately now that I had another chance.
I ended up staying and working pretty much full-time for about four years in that job, but it expanded a whole bunch of other stuff because The guy started getting me to perform on stage, you know, the guy that I was working with, once he started hearing my songs and everything, he said, all right, okay, in the third set, at the end of the night, you come on, just do your songs, though.
People have been listening to these old classic 1950s songs all night, and now there's some...
Young pimply bloke in front of them, singing bullshit.
They're like, what are you doing?
But it was a real baptism of fire.
He also had me tour with him.
So we would be on Thursday, Friday, Saturday in Auckland, in the big city.
And then Sunday through Wednesday, we're in a truck and a car and everything, and we're touring.
We're going playing in these other pubs and stuff.
And he fancied himself, you see, because it's an anachronistic thing, you know.
His whole life, this guy that I was working for was about the 1950s.
He wore blue suede shoes or winkle pickers, stovepipe trousers, drape coats.
You know, he had a Cadillac, probably the only Cadillac in New Zealand at the time, you know.
And he had this thing about, like, you know, Elvis used to have a comedian opening for him, so somebody should go out and tell jokes before I come on, right?
And so part of my job was to walk out and tell a joke that he had told me to tell.
I couldn't make up my own material.
And these jokes were fucking terrible.
They were just trash and trying to make that thing work.
One night I said to him, why don't you let me just go out and say something actually funny or whatever?
He goes, because I want people to be happy to see me.
I love working on films every single day that I'm walking towards the camera.
I will have a plan.
I know what I'm about to do.
And I chose to be here.
I work with lots and lots of actors who just took the role because of blah blah.
They're not really there because of the work.
When you know the job and you know that you're talking about 4 a.m.
starts, you're talking about minimum 12 hours a day, you're talking about working in extreme conditions and stuff like that temperature-wise or somewhere kind of whack to get an amazing shot.
When you know the job and you know how hard it is, You really got to have your reasons for being there.
You know what I mean?
So I'll read scripts and I will generally do the one that got under my skin.
You know?
It can have a great pedigree.
It can be a wonderful director.
It can have a great cast.
But if I read it and I don't get personally attached to it, I just don't do it.
And then I'll read something else that everybody else is like, ah, it's kind of...
Dodgy or whatever.
But there's like, oh, that scene.
It gets me.
That one.
I want to do that.
I want to be the guy doing that dialogue, you know?
So when it gets hard and it gets difficult, it doesn't worry me because I chose to be here, you know?
So I don't have that thing that some actors have of like getting disgruntled with it.
Sure, it's my employment.
It's how I pay for everything.
And all of those things.
But it's also like a deep, deep passion.
And stepping into the shoes of other people and experiencing, to a degree, things of somebody else's life or learning a new skill or whatever it happens to be.
This is exciting for me.
And I'm 60 years old and I still dig it.
You know what I mean?
Because that one simple thing, I know why I'm there.
At 4am when it's like a ball-busting wake-up time because you had a big day the day before, I know why I'm there.
So it's sort of like my motivations and stuff are very clear in that respect.
Now with music, It in itself is its own reward.
To play a song, to sing a song, to be with a group of musicians and to sort of gel on something together.
It's just like, thank you very much.
That's the reward.
To then put it in front of a crowd and then have that immediate response.
Obviously, I've worked with a lot of actors over the years that come from a theatre background, and even though I've done a lot of theatre, I come from a rock and roll background.
I come from out of clubs.
I come from standing on that stage, singing my dweeby 16-year-old songs, authored by a 16-, 17-year-old.
To me, that's my reset place.
People will talk to you, like Anthony Hopkins, I was working with him.
He'd done a series of films, this is way back in the 90s, and I think he was off to do a season of King Lear and he was really happy about it because for him that's a reset.
You go back into that place where you came out of and you get all the benefits of doing the same performance over and over again so you get to squeeze all the different character parts that you can and enjoy it.
That's his reset.
But for me, walking out onto a rock and roll stage, guitar in hand, where I do not know exactly what's going to happen that night, because every audience takes things in a different direction, that's my reset.
That's me jumping out of a plane, and I love doing it.
Yeah, I mean, it's performance, but, you know, there's a visceral thing that happens in front of a live audience, you know, that just doesn't happen in the sterile environment of a film set, you know?
And you can have wonderful creative relationships on a film set and great collaborations and all that sort of stuff, the same that you can have in music, you know?
But there's that other part of it.
There's that...
Thing that sort of, I don't know, it gives you something back, man.
So back in the 90s, the thing about this story is it sort of like just casually shows you how much of a circus the film industry can be, you know what I mean?
And part of the attraction of it when I was a young actor and, you know, later in my 20s moving to Australia and doing theatre and stuff like that and then looking at film people as sort of like a rare breed, you know?
And then you get into it and you realise you've got to be pretty much crazy to do this.
Over time, it's gotten definitely safer, more insurance conscious and all of these things.
But back in the day, not so much.
Everything was about just getting the shot.
So...
92 was the first time I'd go to Los Angeles.
But I'd already made a bunch of films in Australia and I'd been to the Cannes Film Festival so my first time travelling outside of Australia and New Zealand was 1991. So I was like 27 or something like that.
And then the year after I went to LA and got an agent.
But I'd won a bunch of awards in Australia and my films had been around to different film festivals and stuff so There was awareness of what I was doing in the industry, so to speak.
And I got this phone call to go and meet Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian director who won the Oscar for The Last Emperor.
Fantastic director.
He also did Last Tango in Paris and a bunch of other films.
And I was really excited.
I was like, wow, fantastic.
So I get to Bernardo's house.
And he's watching a football game.
It's Italy versus Brazil, right?
He's got a bunch of people over to watch the football.
So I'm sort of just, oh, you know, because I thought we were having a meeting.
I didn't realize there was a football game on.
And Italy didn't do very well.
They got beaten by Brazil.
So I never had a conversation with Bernardo because after the game...
He just went off to his room or something to have a cry, I'm not sure.
But I met his wife, and her name was Claire Peplow, and she was a film director.
And she said, look, I encourage Bernardo to invite you to the house, because I know he wants to talk to you about something, but I want to talk to you as well.
I've had this script, and she gave me this script, and it was called Miss Shumway Waves a Wand.
And I was very much in the independent film world at the time, so that sounded like a good title for an independent film.
And I read it, and it was pretty good.
It was based on this book, and I liked the character, so I sort of responded to it.
Eventually ended up doing it, and Bridget Fonda was signed on as the female lead, so that was cool.
She was pretty happening at the time.
I have a funny thing that goes on with my brain if I'm faced with I'm reading something and there's a difficult moment in something that I'm liking, where my brain just goes, hmm, to be dealt with later.
I'll worry about that when I have to.
And there was this scene where a spider would crawl into the mouth of the character I was playing.
I was thinking, hmm, I wonder how they're going to do that CGI or something like that, you know?
Anyway, so off we go on this adventure and we're shooting in Guatemala and Mexico and it's an extremely disorganized shoot.
We don't have...
Nothing's right.
At one point in time, for seven days, we lived on refried beans and rice in Guatemala because they hadn't made any arrangement with any kind of catering company or anything.
And that was the only thing that they could get easily.
So it was breakfast, lunch and dinner, refried beans and rice.
And at the end of that week, one of the guys on the film crew found this cafe that sold some form of grilled meat and we all just went there in the middle of this rainforest and ate this meat and realized later on it was more than likely we were eating the monkeys that were running around the trees around us because everybody got really sick.
Anyway, so we're going through this experience and we eventually get back to Los Angeles.
And we've got a couple of weeks shooting in LA. We go out to a place called Lancaster, I think it was.
There's an old film studio out there.
And I see on the call sheet, oh, it's the spider scene.
You know, cool.
So as I arrived at the studio, this guy, this producer comes out to meet me.
I said, yeah, cool, but how are we going to do this?
Is this going to be like a CGI thing or whatever?
Oh, no, no, the tarantula man is here.
The fucking what?
The tarantula man's here, and he has shown a variety of creatures to the director, and she has chosen the largest.
It's going to be a great day.
Anyway, good luck with it, and off he tots.
So I go inside, and they show me, look, here's a piece of carpet.
You're going to be lying down here.
The carpet matches a place where a hotel room would shot in.
And so what's going to happen is you're going to lie down here.
They're going to place the tarantula on your chest.
The tarantula wrangler will give it a little tickle.
And as long as you keep your mouth open, it will head directly for your mouth.
They always look for places to hide.
So you've just got to keep your mouth open.
It'll tickle, tickle, tickle.
The tarantula will run up here and into your mouth.
And then the guy will pluck it out of your mouth, you know.
I'm like, okay, cool.
So they turn on all these hot lights, right?
I lie down on the ground.
The tarantula gets put on my chest.
Now, tarantula.
Bigger than my hand, right?
It's a serious spider.
Now, obviously, I've lived in Australia most of my life or whatever.
I'm used to spiders, you know?
That was a large one, right?
So on my chest, tickle, tickle, up it comes, up it comes, into my mouth, right?
And boom, the guy plucks it out.
Done.
And I'm thinking to myself, good little spider.
One take wonder.
Fantastic.
Did everything we need.
And I'm like, cool, so that was good.
They go, oh, no, no, we're just going to shoot it again.
We just have to adjust the lights.
Second take, third take.
Now, one of the things that the producer had said to me in the car park, right, looked me in the eye and said to me, it's not dangerous to use the tarantula because before doing something like this, they milk it of its venom.
So it's perfectly safe, you know?
So I've taken that on board, right?
So we take two, take three, take four, right about after the fifth take.
Now, these lights in that room are very, very hot and my body is starting to Really warm up.
And we're taking a long time between takes, resetting lights and all that.
But after about the fifth take, I get a moment to talk to tarantula men.
How you doing?
All that sort of stuff.
Pretty cool that you can milk the venom from the tarantulas so they can do things like this.
Okay, so what I thought was my only safety net, gone, right?
So take six, take seven, and I'm starting to really get hot.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're all Klieg lights, you know, because it didn't look like anybody had used this studio for a long, long time, you know?
And I'm heating up, and at one point in time, it was about, take seven or eight, and the spider just stops on my neck and starts to sort of like spread its legs out and just sort of like grab at me, you know, and it's sort of pulsing, you know, and then I'm sort of like just lying there going, and then the tarantula guy tickles it, up it goes, you know, and I'm kind of like, well, what was that?
As soon as it started going into the mouth, the guy would just grab it out, you know, because they can cut around that.
As long as they see it going in, then they can cut around it to make it look like it's disappeared in there, you know.
So take eight.
That happens.
The tarantula stops on the neck.
Take nine.
We're done for the day.
So nine takes with a live tarantula crawling into my mouth.
The next day, I wake up and I've got a rash all over me.
My legs and my chest and my arms.
So I call production.
They call a doctor who knows about these sort of things.
He comes over to see me.
He goes, ah, okay.
All right.
See, were you hot yesterday?
I said, very hot, you know, the lights and stuff like that.
He goes, right, right.
And the spider stopped.
Yeah, right.
He goes, okay.
See, tarantulas on their legs have these very fine hairs.
So fine, in fact, that they can easily go through a pore in human skin.
So currently, what you have going on is your body is full of tarantula venom, but not enough to hurt you or even make you just going to have this rash.
So here's this ointment.
Take this pill.
A few days from now, you'll be right.
And the reason that I wanted to tell you this story...
And your listeners is because, and you can check this, you can Google away, I'm pretty sure in the history of cinema, I'm the only Academy Award winning actor who's ever been fucked in the neck by a tarantula.
No, but I did find out I was allergic to one of the things that they tried to fix it with.
It comes up quite a bit.
Every time I've had major injuries and stuff, there's, I can't even remember the name of it now, but there's the go-to thing that they inject into you to take away the initial pain.
But, you know, I mean, temperature's one thing, you know, and you tend to in the film business, you know, if the script says it's bright and sunny and you're in the Bahamas, you're probably going to end up shooting that somewhere far away from the Bahamas and it's going to be freezing, you know.
It's always like that, you know.
It's like a given that whatever it says is going to be the opposite for it.
Whatever the most comfortable way of shooting that scene might be, there'll be something that makes it uncomfortable.
But in terms of discomfort on film sets, physical discomfort...
When you're doing fight sequences or things like that, you know, because they can sometimes take a long, long time.
I shredded both my hamstrings while I was doing NOAA. I flew back to Australia to watch a football game, actually.
My football team that I bought in 2006 had finally made a preliminary final after many years of trying.
And I wanted to be there to witness it.
We ended up losing the game, so it was a waste of money.
But I flew back to Australia, and it also coincided with my youngest athletic day at school.
And I was doing Noah.
I was fit as a bull, strong as an ox, absolutely.
So I rock up to the little athletics day, you know.
And they asked me if I would step in and do this little running race thing.
So I said, yeah, yeah, cool, you know.
So one of my son's friends was in the race and he was coming last.
So I ran up behind him and I was talking to him about going fast or whatever.
But I had to really sprint to catch up to him because I was a long way back.
And I hadn't really noticed that all the kids, because I was up behind him, had got really excited.
They jumped up and they were all standing on the finish line.
And so I got up behind him and I let him just pass me so he could win.
They all go crazy and stuff like that.
But then I have to put the brakes on.
I put the brakes on, and my hamstrings went...
I'm lying on the ground, like vibrating.
And my little boy's there, and he's only like seven or something at the time.
He's like, hi, Dad, that was fun.
And I couldn't talk.
It was like unbelievable, man.
And there was a teacher who'd seen what happened, and he went, Hamstrings?
And I had to get on a plane that night and go back to the film set on Long Island and run to the Ark with 5,000 extras, you know, 50 times with, you know, I mean, I think, you know, we had a...
A rain tower set up that's the biggest in the history of cinema for that, you know?
So I'm getting rained on with these gigantic drops.
I've got 5,000 extras around me.
Actually, no, not 5,000.
Maybe about 1,000 extras around me.
And I've got no hamstrings.
And the scene requires me to run.
And because I've taken time...
Off the set, I can't tell anybody that I've injured myself.
I just have to get on with it.
You know what I mean?
I didn't want any insurance problems or anything else, you know?
But I think it was to do with the fact that, you know, even though I warmed up that morning and I went to the gym and I went on a bike ride and everything, and I got there...
You know, in good shape.
It must have just been the hour sitting around watching the races and everything.
It just cooled me down too much and then having to stop so suddenly just to make sure I didn't barrel into those kids.
Well, they basically get big cranes and they hoist up grids that are laid with hose pipe and the pipe It comes down the tower to a water tank and at a certain point they turn on the pump and they operate like sprinklers basically.
But if you imagine like a metal grid in the air where every joining point of pipes is another sprinkler head And I think we had two and a half football fields worth of, you know, where we could soak at the push of a button.
Yeah, because you see the, I don't know if you've ever seen the movie, but there's these big wide shots of all these people running towards the ark and there's rain falling.
What I thought was the funniest thing with that stuff is when that movie came out, all of this sort of pushback press about how, you know, look at this, Darren Aronofsky, this New York elite, has made Noah into a story about the environment.
And it was like article after article pushing back as if he had done something against Christianity or whatever by acknowledging that this is a story about our environment and how we treat our environment and blah, blah, blah, you know?
I quite enjoy the film, but it's harsh.
It's a harsh telling.
But he did promise me, Darren, at the beginning of that experience, he said never at any stage, which I thought was funny, because he was riffing off a thing that Ridley Scott did.
Ridley Scott said, I promise you don't have to wear sandals, and I promise you, you never have to lie on a couch and have somebody feed you a grape.
So let's do a Roman movie.
So Darren's version was that never at any stage will I have you at the prow of an ark flanked by a giraffe and a lion.
The funny thing with Noah, man, is most people think they know what's in the Bible, but in reality, what most people know is what they read in the Golden Circle children's book of Noah.
They've never read the very few mentions that there are in the Bible or the other mentions.
Religious writings which cover his story because there are other writings from pre-biblical that never made it into the Bible.
Yeah, there's this bizarre feature in the rocks that they believe is where apparently it matches the Bible's description of the actual size of the Ark.
Randall Carlson is an expert in asteroid impacts, and he kind of specializes in this theory about the Younger Dryas impact.
The Younger Dryas impact is somewhere around, they think there's multiple times this happened, somewhere around 11,800 years ago, and again somewhere in the 10,000s.
That this is what happened that caused the end of the Ice Age.
This is what caused the great flooding across North America.
It coincides with that and it also there's a lot of physical evidence of it with core samples and this used to be kind of a fringe theory but they started doing core samples and they found a high level of iridium which is very common in space very rare on earth during that same time period but what's really interesting about this guy is he got this idea when he was overlooking this enormous canyon while he was on acid and And it occurred to him that this is because of not just a river that ran through this
for thousands and thousands of years.
He felt like it was one immense event that took place.
He just had this bizarre vision of this immense event that took place.
When I was doing the research, building up to it, I was quite surprised because in my naivety, I actually had considered it was only like a Christian thing and I didn't realize it was touched on everywhere until I was doing that film.
I would have probably wanted to spend a little bit more time with some Jewish scholars because there's a lot of writings adjunct to the Torah about Noah.
I get to the bottom of that, but I really didn't have the time, so I just had to sort of...
Plow into it with what I had, which is a beautiful two-volume Old Testament and New Testament that Darren got me.
So that was the beginning of the research.
But there's not really much else you can do because you can't go and look up old photos or anything.
So you're pretty much stepping into that world, trying to understand Darren's perspective on it and what he was trying to show that, you know, there had been a big civilization already.
So there was a civilization prior to Noah.
So you're already talking about, you know, a post-apocalyptic world that they're living in and another apocalypse is coming, you know, and it's all based on...
You know, human behavior and what have you.
There's a sequence in the film that some people miss where, like, Noah is looking into these people who are all, you know, sort of the ones who've allowed themselves to give in to their base desires or what have you.
And within the group of people, he sees a man who looks like a rat, you know, gnawing away at the body of something, possibly another human.
And it's him.
So he sees himself on the other side of that.
So Darren had a lot of cool things going in the movie, a lot of great ideas.
And, you know, Outside of America was a huge hit, a massive hit in places like Russia or Brazil or whatever.
But I don't think it's really considered to be a hit because it didn't hit the box office in the United States.
But...
I don't know, it's three or four hundred million or something.
It's bizarre that there's controversy attached to it being that it is about the climate.
It's bizarre that that's become a weird political point and that it's so ideologically connected that people either oppose it or go with it with no information other than the fact that my team believes this.
It is so strange because there's a whole lot of different things that I think, not necessarily on the money, but the bottom line that the burning of fossil fuels is having an effect on On our air quality and how we receive sunshine, etc.
That's an irrefutable fact.
You can't make up your own opinion on that because there's just too much stuff to prove that that's going on.
And it has been going on in our entire lives and it's just been getting worse.
The same things.
We're being talked about in the early 70s when I was in primary school that are now actually physically happening.
But some people just want to see it as yet another game or whatever, and it's really much more important than that.
It's strange because it also – the problem with having this ideology attached to it is it stops the real research to actually be able to objectively understand what has the most effect.
Like what is the thing that's driving us the most and what is the thing that we can do to mitigate that?
Well, the thing is, what we're doing is very unnatural, right?
So we're serving them grain, and we're keeping them in pens, and then all the pig shit and all that stuff gets into the water.
It's very different than a regenerative farm, an actual real farm where cows are grazing, and then their manure fertilizes the land, and it actually sequesters carbon.
And, you know, over time, I sort of learned that all of those factory farming processes are just the absolute wrong thing to do.
You know, I mean, when I first had land and cattle...
I used to love getting up in the dawn, you know, in the darkness, cowdy hat on, stock whip, and getting out and, you know, hurting them and all that sort of stuff.
And then over time, started to realize that That's not good for them.
That sort of stuff's not good for them.
So we developed this system at my place where we have a single laneway and all of the other paddocks where the cattle will be go onto that laneway.
And the paddock can be 100 acres or whatever.
You can muster one man, soft voice, handful of grain.
Just open the gate, you call out a couple of times, they come towards you, you can get every cow in that laneway, then you get up behind them, walk behind them, and you walk them straight to the yards.
Now, we've taken all the fun out of it, but it's just a lot more...
It's, you know, safer, easier, sensible.
And we don't use, you know, hosepipes.
We don't use stockwhips anymore.
We don't muster on ATVs, you know.
It's either on foot or horseback.
And we still use working dogs, but...
The cows don't get upset by the working dogs.
They don't get freaked out by the same way as they get freaked out by an engine roaring up behind them.
And the reason for that kind of pastoral care is because at the end of the day, 100% true, the steak tastes better.
If you don't adrenalize the cattle, if you don't abuse them, it's just better.
It's more tasteful.
Really adrenalized meat gets a very gamey quality, and the steak that we serve on the farm.
I only do all this.
I don't operate it as a business.
I started to operate it as a business for a while there, but kind of found out that everybody in the butchery game is similar to working with people that sell used cars, and they're only looking for the story.
They don't really care about the animal.
I do.
I was laughed at for many years in the valley that I live in because of the way I care for their cattle.
It took us five or seven years to get the certification.
But then I would walk amongst the cattle and because we couldn't douse them because they're organic cattle now, things like buffalo fly and other little things were just all over them.
I thought, man, that can't be good either.
It's like having a kid and never giving the kid Panadol if it gets a fever.
By the time that kid's 14, it hasn't overcome it, and it's not the biggest, best, strongest.
It's this weedy little bloke in the corner.
He spent most of his life sick because he never got the medicine to make it easier for his body to recover.
And that kind of was happening to the cows.
They lost a lot of weight and they just looked in distress.
So I keep my pastures organic.
But I do topical treatments for the cattle, so they don't have to deal with ticks and buffalo fly and things like that.
Where my place is, it's still considered coastal, so we get all of the bitey things that can affect them negatively.
And now I have that balance.
I can't sell them it as organic meat, but they're hand-raised organic pasture.
And as I say, they don't get adrenalized through their life.
So when we do cull them, the meat is a profound experience.
Well, occasionally there's one butcher near me that I trust.
He's really into what he does.
And he will ask if he can have a couple of beasts and I'll let him have it.
We do sell to some neighbors that we know are needing a little bit of assistance.
I don't want to put it in any other terms, but we sell it to them, but we sell it to them for less than it costs to produce and way less than they would be spending if they went to the supermarket.
It comes from when I was getting a little bit of success, I could see things coming along and I sort of had a choice.
I only had enough money to either buy a small apartment in the city or some land.
And my mum and dad weren't in a great place and I hadn't really spent a lot of time with them in the previous decade because I'd been out trying to establish who I was and I didn't really go home very much.
And So what I did is I decided instead of buying an apartment in the city, I'd buy 100 acres in the bush and my mum and dad could go and live there and basically they could start fresh and have a sort of a new experience.
I bought 100 acres initially, but I think I've got 1,700 acres or something now.
But once I had the land, then I started feeling like, well, you've got to do something with it.
It can't just be 100 acres of a garden.
And there's also that thing, too, of you're walking into farmland.
You want to see a horse, you want to see a cow, you know, you want to have something.
So over time, I started, I experimented by holding some cattle for a friend, you know, and I got used to what you had to do and stuff like that.
And they were big longhorn beasts and they were quite difficult to deal with, so that made me decide to go with Angus.
But, you know, here's another story, you know.
I had 20 little calves down in the yards that were being picked up the next day.
And at this stage, I was living in a caravan because I hadn't started building or anything on the property.
And so I go to bed and at about 2 o'clock in the morning, I'm woken up because it's raining.
And I'm trying to get back to sleep.
But all I can think of is these 20 little calves down in the yards and how the floor of the yards will turn into muck and these guys are being picked up the next day and they'll spend the whole night slipping over and sort of covering each other with shit and they'll be in great distress and blah, blah, blah.
So about 2.30, I got up, got dressed, went down to the yards trying to figure out how to get them out of the rain.
I had a shed down there.
But it was about 30 metres away from the edge of the yards.
And I looked around in the shed and I had enough bits and pieces to make a fence for one side.
So I could make one side of this alley.
So then it's just me on the other side.
So I got these big, long pieces of wood.
And then what I had to do was I had to get them running towards me.
Then I had to redirect them along that fence line so they would go inside the shed.
Now while this is happening, it's pissing down rain.
Absolutely tropical rain.
And it took me about, I don't know, 40 minutes, something like that.
So it's deep in the middle of the night now to fix the fence.
And then I got them running and they're coming towards me.
I could see one was about to jink away so I had to sort of dance along with my...
but it was amazing.
You know, I stopped that one little bloke and he rejoined The rest of them, and then they just went like clockwork, just so smooth, straight into the shed, right?
So then in the shed, I laid out some hay and stuff, and I left a little light on.
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You tell stories like that to farmers, and they think you're an absolute idiot.
And I think that's one of the big mistakes that we've made going into this thing of farms getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger because at the end of the day, the thing that drops off is the duty of care.
We give grain to our cattle because there is a nice texture and stuff that comes to the meat beyond being grass-fed.
But we never put them into a feeding pen situation.
And I think that that's also the best part of the balance because, you know, they're still walking around on their home range.
You know, this is where they're used to being.
And then here's a pile of grain over here.
So they supplement their grass with the grain as opposed to just being fed grain purely to put on size.
So what we turn off, Ben, and I think it's partly to do with the fact that they stay active and everything, we get a natural 7% to 10% fat ratio, which is the bottom end of the scale.
But therefore, to me, you're getting more protein.
And therefore, what we're giving you when we give you a steak is like an absolute protein pill.
Yeah, and that's what we don't get from factory farming.
We get the opposite.
We get the worst elements of human nature that kind of put into this very bizarre food supply system that we have where, you know, at every corner in almost every city, there's a place where you can get a quick piece of meat.
You know, a quick, cooked piece of meat of unknown origin.
Yeah, well that's, you know, that only lasts for a few seconds, but that's going to give you the colour that you want, because when I put it down on the grill, I want the colour on that side, because generally I'm only going to turn it once.
Really?
Yeah, I want that first hit to sear the outside of the steak, and that's the side that gets presented to the person that's going to be eating.
The first time I ever ate a steak in Australia, this was like a long time ago, but before I really understood the difference between grass-fed meat and grain-fed meat, I was like, this is different.
It tastes weird.
It tastes weird.
It tastes like richer.
At the time, I don't even think I liked it.
At the time, I was expecting an American-style steak, and I got this rich, red, grass-fed steak.
We met, like, funny resistance here with the release that people couldn't get their heads around the fact that a movie called Cinderella Man was about a boxer.
I mean, what an incredible privilege to be given that beautiful man in my life, you know, with all his experience and his stories and, you know, and his attitude to things, man.
He was like, you know, I mean, occasionally, if you're asked about somebody that he had a negative experience with, you know, he would sort of like see who's around or whatever, and he would just tell you the pure truth.
But for the most part, anybody you asked him about, he was like, ah, what a great guy.
And I asked him about it one day, and he was like, life's too short for the negatives, man.
It's too short to have grudges or opinions, negative stuff.
Just let all that go.
But then in reality, he would have an opinion.
But the public part of that was to just be positive.
And he'd worked with so many fighters and so many different pursuits and And under different pressures and what have you, Ali and Sugar Ray, you know, 15 world champions he coached.
That's incredible.
And the beautiful thing happens, you can see it in Cinderella Man, there's a moment towards the end of the movie, right, where Braddock's won.
He's won the world championship.
And I'm standing in the ring and I'm walking towards my corner, right?
And this little bald man walks towards me, right?
And this shot, I start laughing and I bend forward and I kiss him on his head, right?
Because he's walking towards me in the ring and he was going, Number 16, baby!
Number 16!
And that's what he called me for the rest of his life.
Whenever I saw him, he would introduce me to people as, this is my friend Russell, number 16. Wow.
Cool, man.
But, you know, I mean, a normal day, training for that film, you wake up in the morning, you go for a walk, you know, probably about 5Ks, right?
Then we'd go and do yoga.
Then we'd go and do the first boxing session, which would take us to lunch.
We'd have a little bit of lunch.
Then we'd do the second boxing session.
After the second boxing session, we'd do weights.
Then you'd have about 90 minutes off.
Then we'd have dinner, and then you'd go for a walk.
Five and a half thousand, six thousand choreographed moves.
You get to a certain point, how do you accelerate this?
How do you change the rhythm?
So, the fight with Troy, which I think is the The last fight before the championship, that's 100% the two of us in the ring beating the piss out of each other.
Yeah, and the thing is, you know, you have to dial into his body, you know, his body language.
You know, he used to do this little foot flick thing, right, to get himself around, you know, where he always, like, he would move his front foot first.
He wouldn't cross his feet over at all, you know, so he's just sort of crabbing up on somebody and going back, you know.
Learning that, getting that drilled into my head because it felt so unnatural.
But it's there.
After a while, you get it.
You can move quite fast.
But that natural instinct is to cross your feet over, but that leads to all sorts of problems.
It was a very interesting experience during that movie.
And Ron Howard, as the director, you know, I'd worked with him the year before on A Beautiful Mind, and he's a very exacting guy, and he likes to do things over and over again, you know?
So when we first started that shoot, I don't know if you know this, but I subluxated my left shoulder.
I was doing a little fight with a guy called Wayne Gordon, another Canadian Olympian, and he just caught me on the point of my elbow and just put my shoulder out, you know?
But because I was so fit at the time and so strong, it went out and back in.
But it came back in with such force that it broke the bone.
So I had to go and have an operation.
I tore the labrum tissue and broke the bone.
So I had an op and the normal recovery is like three and a half months or something.
But I was making a movie.
I couldn't do that.
And they were going to cancel the film.
They were going to just shut it down and all that.
And I was like, no, no, no, no.
I've waited for years to do this film.
And I've already done the training, so we've got to finish this.
Well, it's funny that you should bring that up because on that shoot, after that night, I said, if we're going over there all the time, I'm living right next to the Liberty helipad in Chelsea.
Just a 10-minute trip.
Get me out of the freaking car.
Because that movie was so...
It was a lot to carry around.
The freaking mindset I had to be in all the time for that.
And so they ended up agreeing.
So I would literally walk to the helicopter pad, jump in a helicopter, 10 minutes.
The relief when that movie was over was huge, you know?
Because you do tie yourself in knots a little bit when you're playing a character like that.
And that's part of the job, and you just go with that flow, you know?
But yeah, I was very, very happy to put all of the detail of those diseases aside.
Because the guy that wrote it, his mum and dad treat people with schizophrenia.
So he had a lot of first-hand knowledge that he could pass on to me.
And a lot of that was to do with physical tells.
And when the physical tells happen in the course of somebody's connection to the disease.
The thing about Beautiful Mind is it has a device in the film.
The film begins, you believe everything that's unfolding in front of you, and then there's that click when you realize, hold on a second.
Have I been watching him, or am I inside his head?
That's the thing.
Worldwide, that trick works.
I saw that movie at a few premieres around the world, and there's this gasp that comes out of the audience.
It's only 15, 20 minutes in when they go, and they realize that they've been inside the head of a sick man, as opposed to watching some spy drama unfold.
I'd rented a beautiful house over there on the other side of the river.
I don't know why I'm pointing that way.
I don't even know which direction the river is from here.
Jeffrey Katzenberg busted my nuts about reading it.
I was like, man, I'm doing the band shows.
I'm recording with the band.
I just want to be in this space because I need you to read it now.
And he'd been part of the Gladiator so I read it and I ended up ringing him and thanking him because the experience of reading the script was just fantastic.
One of the best scripts I'd ever read and it had that device on the page.
So that wasn't a trick added by the filmmakers later.
The same experience of reading it is the experience you have when you're watching in the cinema.
Yeah, man.
So it was about, I don't know, 2 o'clock in the morning sitting on the back porch of that house.
It was still over 100 degrees.
It was really hot.
And I read it in one go.
I thought to myself when I sat down to read it, I was like, I'll read 10 pages.
It'll put me to sleep, right?
And it didn't get me awake.
And I remember putting that script down and walking and jumping into the swimming pool, you know, at three or four in the morning or whatever, going, I'm absolutely doing that fucking movie.
And if I work on it when I read it, that's the one I'm going to do.
And I've stuck true to that.
Even, as I was saying before, sometimes it can be a really imperfect document.
But there's just a couple of things that resonate.
So it's like, okay...
I have to do it.
My joke is that in that way I respect the gods of film.
It's like I'm only there because I have my reasons and I need to be there.
And that way now it doesn't always work out.
But you can do the greatest pedigree movie and it tanks.
You can have A-lister number one, A-lister number two, A-lister director.
Great subject matter.
Nobody goes and sees it.
There's sort of a type of alchemy, you know?
And, you know, I came out of an independent film world and then suddenly a couple of those independent films got successful and it led me to another place, you know?
But I still like to work in an independent world because, you know, if one hits, that's the one that's going to be...
Fun and important or whatever if it comes out of nowhere.
Studio films, it's great if it's the right situation.
I'm not saying that there's a negative in doing that.
If you know what I've done, I've done all sorts of big studio budget films.
I'm Superman's Dad in DC. I'm Zeus the God of Gods in Disney Marvel and I'm Kraven the Hunter's Russian father in Sony Marvel.
The experience of doing those films is the same for me as other things.
I go to work, I have a particular character thing in mind, this is what I'm trying to do.
The thing about my job, man, In reality, most film directors you work with are genius.
They're genius people.
Male filmmaker or whatever.
The person that has worked to the point of getting to helm a feature film where you have to cover all of the aspects, from the production design to the sound to how you're shooting or what lenses you're using.
You know, the people that you're working with, where you shoot it, you know, all of those responsibilities come on the film director, you know?
So the joke I often make about working with Ridley, it's like, I get to hold the paint palette for Titian.
While Titian's doing his shit, and he turns to me and goes, Russell, I need more blue.
And I go, right you are.
I'll give you some blue.
It's a good gig, you know what I mean?
Being able to work with super smart people, you know?
And I've been talking to whatever that is all the way through my life.
I actually say this on stage at the moment because I have a song called Michelangelo's God which relates to an experience I had recently with my mum.
I decided that when I heard that they were making another gladiator that I was going to take my sons to Rome so they get to experience what I've experienced since that movie came out with the people of Italy and the people in the city of Rome.
In terms of the privileges that they give me and the experiences that they give me and the regard and what have you.
And I thought, you know, before there's another one and that water's muddied, you know, I'm going to take my kids over so they can really experience it.
So I was talking to my mom and my father had just recently passed away and I said, why don't you come with us?
And initially she said that because she'd only ever been to Rome with my dad, that she didn't want to come because she thought it would just make her sad, you know, because that city connected her to him.
And I said to her, Mum, listen to what you're saying.
This is a place that connects you to my father.
You have to come.
So she came along and we were doing all the normal family stuff together, touristy stuff, Spanish Steps, Fontana de Trevi.
I took the kids to see the old office, the Colosseum.
But so, later in that same visit, he took us to this little balcony, and to get onto this balcony, not the one on TV, it's another meditation balcony right on top of the museum.
To get there, we have to go in this very small little elevator, you know?
So, I'm there, just me and my mum, say, how you going?
Enjoying it?
And she just starts Floods of tears, man.
Crying, crying.
She goes, I can't explain.
I just feel your father so close to me.
We get up on that balcony, right?
In the distance, I can hear some music.
So I asked our man, what's the music?
And he says, well, it's a Wednesday.
The Swiss Guards Band is rehearsing.
They only play ecclesiastical music.
But I can hear what they're playing, and so can my mum.
And it's that old Irish folk song, Danny Boy.
The reason that that comes into the conversation we're just having is we played that at my father's funeral.
So here it is, this moment.
How does that timing work out?
Where's the coincidence factor of that?
What's the odds of that?
They never play anything other than ecclesiastical music, but on the day that we're in a place where we can hear a private rehearsal of the Swiss Guards Band, they just happen to be playing the song played at my father's funeral.
When I've gone through this whole process of convincing my mum to come with us, and she says she can feel my dad all day, she was saying that and shedding tears from it, and there we had that moment together.
Wow!
So I don't know how it works.
I don't know really.
What I do feel is that All religions are simply a human way of trying to explain the inexplicable.
There is definitely, because I have examples of it in my life, if you offer, and we can call it prayer, or you could call it just an introspective conversation, if you focus on using your imagination and your personal energy to change things around you, they will change.
You can do a lot of things with simply the power of your beautiful mind.
So that's kind of where I sit with it.
I don't know what it is, but I know it's available, so I use it.
I did, actually, because they wanted me to go and see their armory.
Again, another experience that you would never have, right?
So I get taken down, and here's the history of the Swiss Guards and their connection to the Pope, and here's all of the armor.
That's been worn by the guards over the centuries.
Here's all the weapons and the swords and all that sort of stuff.
And I did ask them about the Danny boy and the first guy I talked to was like, no, they wouldn't have played that if misheard it because they only play ecclesiastical music.
But apparently they were building up to some performance for some visiting dignitary and that was the choice of song for that thing.
There's something undeniable about just being in the Vatican itself.
St. Peter's Basilica to this day is one of the most incredible experiences I've ever had just walking to that place and just trying to imagine the worksmanship, the artisan, the artistic ability to duplicate the kind of The incredibly intricate designs that are in that ceiling and how uniform they are and how gorgeous they are and how many hundreds of years it took to accomplish.
The first time that I walked in there, which was 1991, And this probably sounds a bit weird, but I got sort of offended or something.
It was so over the top and so incredible.
And I thought about it from the perspective of this is a group of men trying to build a mountain to show you they're as powerful as God or something like that.
Yeah, you know, it was damaged between the wars, I think, by a Turkish guy who was either born in Australia or had been living in Australia, and he went to Rome.
And back then they used to be able to walk right up to it, you know?
And, I don't know, he hit it with a hammer or something like that and damaged it.
Yeah, but that was, you know, I just wanted my kids to experience a little bit of that because it has been an incredible relationship I've had with that country.
And I know all about the negativities involved in the process, and it doesn't stop me.
So it just goes to show how potent it is as a drug.
Yeah, so I basically just stopped all exercise to try and sort of get into the shape of the guy that I was playing.
And I met Jeffrey Weigand, the guy that I was playing.
And it was a funny thing because...
Michael Mann was convinced that Jeffrey was an expert golfer.
And so I'd been doing these golf sessions and stuff.
And I met him at a golf course and took him to the driving range.
And he was not an expert golfer.
And I asked Michael, where did you get that impression from?
He said, well, the way he talks about it, I said, ah, cool, cool.
So I used that too as part of the personality of the guy.
The guy thought his golf game was way better than it really was.
It's just an interesting little...
You know, details.
So there's one conversation where golf comes up and you can see there's like a little colour comes up in his cheek because he wants to defend himself or beat himself up or whatever.
It's just absolute minor detail.
No concern to anybody else except me, but it amused me, you know.
But in that conversation, you know, and I asked him some pretty tough questions.
And, you know, probably, you know, at my age now, questions I would never ask somebody in that situation.
But, you know, I was younger and, you know, had that kind of confidence.
And I kind of crossed into some territory that wasn't comfortable for him and I made him cry.
And he didn't want to cry, but he was sitting opposite me and he was sort of like emotionally affected.
And I was like, man, I have to honor this man.
I have to put every effort I can into making sure that I tell his story the right way around.
Then I met Ridley, and I was coming off that film, and I'd made a decision at the beginning because we kept cutting my hair and dyeing it.
We've bleached it seven times, but it wouldn't behave like an old person's hair.
We could comb it into place, and then the next day it would go...
We took the hairline back, shaving the hair back and everything.
I mean, I just looked so fucking weird.
And at a certain point, I just said to Michael Mann, I said, just get me a wig.
This is just crazy, you know?
I'll shave my head, just get me a wig, I'll wear the wig, because then my hair's going to be exactly right, you know?
And that's what we did.
So when I met Ridley, I was maybe 35 or 40 pounds heavier than I'd been on L.A. Confidential, which was the last movie that he'd seen me in.
I was bald, and I had a really weird sort of suntan because of wearing the wig.
So my face had some, but my head was white, you know?
And I don't know how he could possibly have ever seen me as the character.
But yeah, that first conversation I had with him, and I said, when are you starting?
And he's like, January.
And I was like, that's about three months, you know?
So the first thing I did was I went back home and I went on a motorcycle ride.
For about 10 days.
And I sent a guy ahead of me in a van with a cooker.
So wherever I decided I was going to stop that night or whatever, I could only eat his food, you know?
And it was just really, really basic, just sort of salads and beans and stuff like that, you know?
It's changed so much over time, the knowledge we have for nutrition and everything.
Back then, you're pretty much working off some really dodgy information.
At one point in my life, everybody was told the Mediterranean diet is the key, so eat pasta every day, just like the Italians do.
Cut to a whole bunch of big people.
The thing being is the food production process is not the same necessarily in other countries outside of Italy.
Italy or France, whatever they have, food production methods that are like artisan methods that have been used for a long, long time and pretty much most of the places you go that food has It hasn't necessarily been affected in the same way as it might in a more westernized country like America, like Australia.
We borrow your food production methods, so we've got corn syrup up the Jaxi and everything now as well.
I don't think when we started, I don't think I was ready, but by the time we're halfway through the film and my shirt's coming off and all that sort of stuff, I'd had enough time and enough focus on it to get it to a certain place.
Yeah, I took it upon myself because I didn't get to go to drama school.
I just started working.
I was working, as I said, in clubs and stuff like that.
And when I started moving into doing more acting stuff...
I was born in New Zealand.
I moved to Australia when I was four.
Moved back to New Zealand with my parents when I was 14. Then at 21, I moved back to Australia by myself because I considered Australia to be my home.
I'd lived there between four and 14. That's your formative years.
I never felt like New Zealand, even though it was the land of my birth.
It was really home.
So I went back to where I felt comfortable.
I went back with the idea that You know, I've been doing all these clubs and bands and stuff like that, but I'm going to sort of change the priority.
I'm going to focus more on acting and put the music, you know, underneath it.
And one of the things that I'd planned on doing was working enough, saving money to then go to NIDA, the National Institute of Dramatic Art, and get a piece of paper that says I know how to do my job, right?
The year was 88, I think.
I'd been in Australia for a couple of years by then.
I had an agent.
Things were going really, really well.
Solid work, being able to save money.
And I was doing a show at...
This theatre and a guy called Bruce Applebaum, who had been my brother's biology teacher in high school, but who had become a friend of one of my uncles.
And he came to see the show, and he came backstage.
And at that point, he was the technical director for the National Institute of Dramatic Art.
So he said, so what's your plan?
And I said, well, I've got the money in the bank.
I'm auditioning for NIDA in October or whenever it was.
And he goes, what?
You're going to go to drama school?
I said, yeah, I want to do it.
He goes, I walked into this theatre tonight.
As I was walking to the theatre, there's a banner that says the name of the show.
Above the name of the show is your name.
It's too late for you to go to drama school.
You already do what you're supposed to learn at drama school.
The only thing that you'll pick up is bad habits.
So in that one conversation...
This dream I'd harboured for about four or five years just disappeared.
But it was absolutely the right advice for me to receive at that time.
It would have been probably a big waste of my time to go into a drama school situation at that point.
When you're doing a character, whether it's Braddock or The Gentleman from The Insider, and you're playing an actual human being, that must come with another level of responsibility, right?
Especially The Insider.
That was the first film where I had saw that kind of changed my perspective on things and made me openly consider the idea that a corporation would have someone assassinated if they were going to affect their business.
And I saw that movie.
I remember seeing that movie going, Jesus Christ.
And it took me down a rabbit hole of reading about the history of the tobacco industry and lobbyists and what they had done to try to obscure the fact that it was causing cancer and addicting people and all the chemicals they'd put into those things.
You're playing a guy who risked his life.
To tell us, to let everybody else know, hey, there's some nefarious forces involved in this business.
It's not as simple as they're just selling you cigarettes.
Yeah, well, like, the responsibility is the right word.
You know, that experience that I was sharing with you, where I sat in front of him and asked him some tough questions, and I pushed a button emotionally.
And it was about his family and the question, you mean?
Yeah.
It was about the effect of the situation on his family.
And that took him to a place, and I could see him just get, you know, emotional.
I realized he's still, all these years later...
Is carrying this around, you know?
That was a big thing for him to do.
As you say, he risked everything in his life.
Risked his professional reputation, the health and safety of his family, you know, to put that information in front of us.
The weird thing for me about all of that is that this legal loophole kind of situation you get into where If you admit something is unsafe, then you're liable for the fact that you peddled something that was unsafe.
Because there's a whole lot of things that you can do to make these less...
Potent in terms of how they damage you, you know, you can take out the chemicals You can return the tobacco to its more natural state, you know, but we don't do any of that Because that would be admitting That it's an unsafe product and it opens up a whole bunch of more legal But, you know, it's a funny thing.
I don't want to be an advocate for cigarette smoking.
But there are, you know, there is a long, long history of us and, you know, wanting to smoke things.
Well, there's a funny thing, though, right, that somebody sort of said to me once, and it's a true thing, is like, you know, when you haven't had a cigarette for a while and you get a craving, right, that's all you have to deal with.
But also to satisfy that craving, when you do satisfy that craving, it's an immediate release of one of the most pressing physical things that's bothering you.
The most pressing physical thing that's bothering you is you want a cigarette.
And so it's sort of like I've had experiences where, you know, for an extended period of time, I'm in this battle of trying to completely get rid of it out of my life.
But all of these other things are being negatively affected because I'm not making decisions.
So you're going to be in the ring doing boxing stuff for 12 hours.
So when we started that film, Ron Howard's idea was to do the first 35 days of boxing and then do the scenes afterwards.
But after we did the first fight, which took six or seven days, I said, you've got to rethink that.
I'm rehabbing from the shoulder.
35 days in a row.
It's like, it's going to break down, man.
We have to.
So we redid the schedule and we cycled back into the boxing.
So I'd box Mondays and Tuesdays and then basically Wednesday would be off physically and then I would start the prep gearing up for the next boxing day.
And what was good about it is that it kept me in shape through the whole shoot.
If we'd done 35 days of boxing and then stopped and then done another 30 shooting days where I didn't have to box, James J. Braddock would have changed shape during the course of the film.
It was because I was cycling back into the boxing that I stayed in shape and kept improving because we had gaps in between so I'd learn a little bit more from Angela or whatever and would be able to adjust something.
So it was a really good choice to make because it made, and it was because of doing that that Ron was able to clearly see we need another gear change between now and the championship.
And that's when we came up with the idea, well, the only way we can have a gear change is if we just do it for real.
But when I did the real fight, I did it with the fellow Troy, who was a really lovely bloke, great boxer, great athlete, incredible on the ropes, on the skipping rope, just superior.
I did it with him because I wanted the challenge of doing it.
If we're going to do it for real, I want to do it with him.
And we were chasing each other around that ring.
It was...
Incredible experience, but it's just that thing, he's a good, solid guy, and I know he was never going to kill me.
There was a couple of blokes in that cast.
If he gets the opportunity, he's too feral.
He'll just take my head off.
If I give him half a freaking break, he'll just put one through.
And then I did a street martial art thing as well.
I'd get to halfway up the belt ladder and then I'd move on to something else.
But it's funny because all of that training comes into play later on in my life.
Funnily enough, I always say to people, It's actually my musical theatre background and dance routines that make my fight sequences so sharp.
Because it's sort of like you're working with a rhythm.
And if you're working with a camera and the camera's trying to catch something, if you have that rhythm, then you can display the stuff that you want the camera to capture and the audience to see.
But a lot of people think I'm joking when I say it, but it's for real.
Yeah, he beat Kambosis from Australia, who's also an elite fighter.
But he was trained by his father from the time he was very young, and his father made him take two years off of boxing to learn Ukrainian dance to help his footwork.
I did Budokan to start with, then I did Sir Daw, which is a kung fu, and then I did Zendikai after that, which is more of a street fighting thing, which is headbutts and shit.
I always say that if Jake Paul was not a YouTube star, if people just looked at him like an up-and-coming boxer, you would say, this kid's got a lot of fucking talent.
He's dangerous.
He's dangerous.
I think his strength is that people, for whatever stupid reasons, they underestimate him because of what his background was.
And they think there's no way that some guy who became famous off of YouTube is going to be an actual legit boxer.
But if you look at what he's done, the time that he's put into it, and the ability that he has, just the sheer ability, he's a very good boxer.
No matter what you're taking and what they're doing for you, you're still 58. But 58-year-old Mike Tyson is not 50-year-old Mike Jones that lives down the street.
It's a different kind of human being, and he still can knock your fucking head into another dimension if he can catch you.
The thing is, can he catch a 28-year-old guy who's at the top of his career who's winning legitimate boxing matches?
I mean, he's beating former UFC world champions like Tyron Woodley.
He had that very good fight with Tommy Fury, who's a legitimate boxer, which was a very good fight.
He just beat up Mike Perry, who's a bare-knuckle champion.
It's a...
He's a real fighter.
He can fight.
And if Mike Tyson and him are fighting and Mike can't catch him, and Mike has bad knees, if his back's bad, I mean, I don't know what's going on with him physically.
It's hard to tell from a guy just hitting pads.
When he's hitting those pads, he looks great.
Like, yeah, if he can do that, if he can actually do that for eight rounds or ten rounds, however long this fight is.
The thing is, I was quite enjoying the second phase of Mike's life.
He was terrifying as a boxer.
Terrifying.
I met him at one point backstage at a stadium at a fight, and I was like, I'm still terrified of you.
From watching you.
But then that guy he started becoming where he became more explorative and he was looking into the meaning of life and having a smoke every now and then and stuff like that.
I was like, I'm enjoying this, Mike.
I'm liking the evolution.
What bothers me with this whole thing is that he's got to kind of slide back to that warrior.
Because I was going to make the table more narrow and be closer to the guests.
I had him on once when he was retired and he was much heavier and he was smoking a lot of weed and he was contemplative and interesting and philosophical and just a fun guy to hang out with.
And then I had him on again when he was about to fight Roy Jones Jr. And he had lost about 60 pounds.
That would be nice, but it's probably not going to happen.
It's probably going to be one of two things.
It's either going to be Jake Paul's going to find out that 58-year-old Mike Tyson is still a motherfucker, or we're going to find out that 58-year-old men are 58-year-old men no matter what they look like.
And Jake Paul is a 28-year-old athlete in the prime of his life.
So, they're able to do this signaling pathway that's been implicated in articular cartilage repair.
IGF-1 is a member of the family of growth factors.
Structurally closely related to pro-insulin can promote, I don't know what that word is, chondrocyte prolification.
Enhance matrix production and inhibit catabolism.
Moreover, we discussed the potential role of IGF-1 in OA treatment.
Of note, we summarized the recent progress on IGF delivery systems.
Optimization of IGF delivery systems can facilitate treatment application and cartilage repair and improve OA treatment efficacy.
So there's this and there's another one that's in Australia where they're using it on sheep right now and they're able to regrow cartilage on sheep and they're about to begin human trials on that as well.
Healing and discovering animal models consuming to new human therapies.
So this is the next stage, right?
Because right now there's nothing they can do about cartilage.
What stem cells have been really effective at is soft tissue injuries.
Tendon repair, things along those lines, and a lot of neurological disorders that people have, especially IV versions.
They've done a lot with Dr. Neil Reardon in Panama.
He's had some great results with that.
And great results.
Mel Gibson came in and talked about his experiences with that and his father.
His father was in a wheelchair when he was 80, 10 years later at 90, was walking around.
And this is after stem cell.
They can do some pretty extraordinary stuff, especially outside of the country, because outside of America, America has the FDA, and the FDA is very strict on this stuff.
But if you can go to Tijuana, there's a place called the Cellular Performance Institute.
They send a lot of UFC fighters down there.
They had amazing results.
Amazing.
They're shooting them into people's discs and growing disc tissue on people that have...
Disc degeneration issues.
It's just we're real close.
We're real close to being able to regenerate all kinds of stuff.
So just gotta hang in there.
Hang in there.
But I guarantee you what the stem cells can do is help heal what can heal in that area, reduce inflammation, give you more range of motion, and give you a much more pain-free experience.
I've got, you know, both shoulders are shit, but the left one is particularly shit.
And it's like, you know, like even on this tour we've been doing, because we've been traveling like 35,000 kilometers or something on this tour, and, you know, sometimes it's in a plane, but other times it's in a, you know, hopefully a bus, but most of the time just a car, or at one point we were traveling around in a pet transport van.
So I'm kind of, probably doesn't look like it to you, but I'm actually in the process of that 10 years of allowing myself to be in a certain shape and playing all sorts of roles for that.
But when I finished Nuremberg in April or so, I just said, okay, that decade's over and I'm going to go back the other way.
So I was 126 kilos.
When I came off Nuremberg, I'm currently 112 and a half.
I feel even if I start working less, which is something that's also in the back of my mind, if I'm going to spend more time for myself and not working, then I want to be in a particular place so I can enjoy it a little bit more.
Well, it's just the thing is, I can't, because of all the damage everywhere, because what I used to do is just outrun my, you know, go through a period of, you know, abusing yourself and then just outrun it.
And I simply can't do that anymore.
You know, I just can't outrun the years of, you know, of abuse.
Yeah, but what I'm trying to do is actually make the adjustments without relying on Olympic-level physical preparation.
I'm just trying to bring it down purely through...
Diet and the fact that I've been losing weight while I'm on a tour like this where you don't have consistency in the way you can exercise and the food that's available to you at 2 o'clock in the morning after you've finished a gig is pretty hairy.
The fact that I've actually still been able to come down is amazing.
I've never been on a tour with a band in my life, and I've been doing this stuff since the early 80s, and lost weight.
You go on tour, you gain weight.
That's what happens.
So it's been pretty – I'm really looking forward to being back on the farm where it can be consistent and add a little sort of consistent exercise to it.
Oddly enough, I would never have thought this, and it doesn't seem logical, but when I got to a point with my Achilles that was affecting everything that I was doing, and they set me up, I did You know, full blood injections, platelet-rich injections, did all of that stuff, you know.
And then you're banging yourself with painkillers because it's such a heavy hit when you do that sort of thing, particularly with the Achilles, you know, and the moon boot and all that, you know.
And it just wasn't working, man.
And I was doing the rehab exercises and everything, and I could feel that with the rehab exercises that they were re-damaging the area.
They weren't making it better, you know.
So I kind of said to the guy that I was working with, that's just like, I gotta stop.
I gotta stop.
Because every time I see you, then I limp the next day.
But if I don't do the exercises, after a certain amount of time, the limp gets less.
So I have to come up with some other way of doing it.
And he said I was crazy at the time or whatever.
Then I started going out with a girl who loves playing tennis.
I used to like playing tennis when I was younger, so cool, let's play tennis.
Our romance is based on the fact that the first time I played tennis, I couldn't beat her.
I've got to keep you around and play you enough times till I work out how to grind you into the dirt, young lady.
But here's the thing with tennis, with the short bursts of running, right?
And it's not constant, like 10Ks on a treadmill Wow.
or whatever.
It's just a short burst of running.
And then you've got a minute while you sort of gather yourself together.
You have a break between games or whatever.
And then another burst of running, another burst of running.
I seem to have rehabbed my Achilles by playing tennis.
It could be also, too, that those platelet-rich injections and stuff that they were doing in the timeline that they were considering to be the right timeline is incorrect.
You're doing a little bit and then the next day you might do that same move again or whatever, you know, but it's not wearing it down at the same time.
That's what I found with the rehab exercises, that it felt to me As I said, I think that I was re-injuring.
Right.
They would stretch, stretch, stretch to a certain point.
That's good.
Then you do that one set of them too many and you feel that little click again and you know that it's re-taunt.
It doesn't seem to, you know, bear logic, but here it is, you know, sort of.
And, you know, I've started riding bicycles again now and everything because it got to the point, man, where the pain, you know, if you went on a mountain bike for 15 or 20 k's, it's just white hot pain in the back of my heels, you know?
Yeah.
But now I'm enjoying it again and, you know, having fun with it.
And he's like, well, I just worked out how to make the education system work for me.
And I'm like...
This guy.
Wow.
He's so impressive.
And it's like, I remember the first time he said a word, and now he has the intellectual capacity to realize that this is a moment in his life if he grabs what he can in terms of his education.
And he's looked at Latin and Greek and gone, if I can nail Latin and Greek, every language is available to me.
So it's like, it's just, you know, I mean, to sit back and be impressed with your kids at that sort of level.
Well, you're seeing that now in American politics more than ever because the person that's actually in office is saying what she's going to do if she gets into office.
The unfortunate thing is, and it affects Australia as much as it affects here, we have such an aggressive media situation and the media's need for new information, new stories, whatever that timeline is.
You're just not going to get people of quality stepping into that world anymore.
Like, we have to put that shit aside, recognize that people are just human beings and stop dragging out old shit just to make your party win because it ruins the entire system.
Well, it's also people recognize that a lot of us that claim to be on one side or the other really are somewhere in the middle.
But most people have opinions that are a little bit of a conglomeration of both conservative and liberal perspectives, especially like liberal socially, fiscally conservative.
Well, in this country, Kamala Harris recently got caught because the campaign was using articles and they changed the article.
They changed the titles of the article.
They put out fake positive articles.
And the fact that you can do something like that, you can persuade people to think that people are writing about something when you're actually putting it out there, which is just bananas.
It's just a complete manipulation of the zeitgeist.
We've got a situation in Australia at the moment Where politicians are suing people for, you know, what they say is the loss of their reputation or whatever, right?
Because that person might have commented somewhere on social media or something and said, you know, X person is X. And so now, you know, certain politicians have worked out, oh, I can make money out of this.
I was probably a relatively early adopter of it, but for a while there, it was like, oh, this is the thing that we've been looking for in that I can put a A post up here saying that I'm going to do a show in Germany and I don't have to spend a dollar on advertising or do the interviews and stuff.
And for a while there, it was really potent, but it's definitely dropped off.
It seems like there's a whole lot of people, the people that you'd want to be reading your stuff, that have just decided, you know, my life's a lot better if I don't.
And so that's all you feel we've got so many people around the world, places like Australia, like New Zealand, like England, like here, you know, who's.
Anger is all based on misinformation.
They've had their morality rewired because they've been pummeled so much by somebody who doesn't care what their response is.
Doesn't care whether what they're publishing is true.
They just don't care.
I don't know if you ever saw it, but I played Roger Ailes in a TV series called The Loudest Voice.
He'd worked on television in the 60s, but then he met Richard Nixon and became an advisor to Nixon.
And he tried to set up a White House news service back in the late 60s.
Tried it again in the 70s, tried it again in the early 80s, but the technology just wasn't there.
And the money wasn't there.
But then he met Rupert Murdoch and explained to Rupert that all you need to do to attract 50% of the news audience is just make a decision politically.
Because that's half the available audience.
I can't remember all the figures and everything, but the way he set up Fox News, it just became an absolute cash cranking machine because they got it into the affiliates and stuff like that by offering it at a lower price.
And then, you know, got to his, you know, subscriber numbers that still had it making money between advertisers and subscribers at that lower price.
So when that first deal then changed after 10 years and people were then charged, you know, the subscribers were paying a regular price, all of that was profit.
Because he already had it working at the lower price.
I think it's something like it was $10 a head in an atmosphere where it was normally $33.
So then when that first contract finished and it went to the normal subscriber rate, you've got that difference in 77 million subscribers times an extra $23.
And then you have a real problem today on social media where you have bots, where there's a really unknown number of entities that are commenting constantly in one way or another about political issues.
I never got into Facebook, so I don't understand it, and I don't really understand Instagram either.
We use it for stuff to inform people about gigs with the band, but Twitter was the only one that I was interested in because it was whack, it was funny, and you're connecting to people all over the world.
I've had some really funny situations arise because of something I commented on and then somebody gave me another piece of information about or whatever.
I've learned a hell of a lot out of it, but just the last year or two, it's gotten worse.
There's one particular one that comes up all the time.
It's a shot from Les Mis where I'm looking in this doorway and I'm in, you know, police uniform of the time and I just kind of go, slide into this doorway.
And people apply it to so many different situations.
You know, I mean, I think it's fascinating because it's a new thing.
I think all this information that's being exchanged online, even though it's messy, even though it's kind of negative, I'm very hopeful because I think we're going to figure all that stuff out eventually if we don't kill ourselves.
And it's going to get to a better place of understanding human beings because you're gonna be human beings just interacting with human beings in a pure sense without Forming our narratives from mass media without forming our narratives from television You're gonna get dissenting opinions people to give more nuanced perspective on things and if you follow the right people And you read the right things and you do kind of shy away from a lot of the more polarizing arguments and the ideological stuff.
But I try and shy away from coming up with a definitive opinion because then you're sort of out on the edge of that limb and you're going, well, it looked like that to me.
It'll be interesting the next couple of years, for sure.
I think I'm a little worried about America in the next little while.
I haven't been here for five years, man.
In 2019, I finished The Loudest Voice, and I went home, and then COVID hit.
And I had kind of an incredible experience where I said to my boys, look, you're cool in the city with your mum and everything, but...
I might go up to the bush and be with my parents because, you know, they're older and everything's going to change for them and stuff like that.
So I ended up, you know, I've owned my place in the bush since 96. But 2020 was the first time I'd seen all four seasons of the same year at the farm, you know.
And I got this thing where, you know, my dad dies in March 2021. And so often you talk to people and they say, you know, I wish I had one more dinner, one more hug, one more conversation or whatever, you know.
But when I looked at it, because it was a surprise when he died, it wasn't expected.
He was 85, but he seemed to be quite healthy.
And in reality, when I looked at it, it's like, well, I got a whole year.
I got a whole year of having dinner pretty much every night with my mum and dad and asked him a million questions and stuff.
Not because I thought he was about to pass away.
It was just because We had the time together.
And I took him on a few adventures.
I was digging a huge dam on my place to try and make it drought-proof.
So I now have a 70-megaliter lake in the middle of my place, which gives me enough water to feed the cattle and stuff for seven years, something like that.
One day we went out, I went out to show him what was basically a hole in the ground at the time, about a football field size hole in the ground.
I took him out in a buggy and the clouds came over and it started pissing down with rain.
So I've got an 83 year old old man who doesn't move too fast or whatever, I've got to put him back in the buggy.
And by the time we got halfway back to the house, it was absolutely torrential rain.
We were just getting covered in it.
I was so worried.
I thought, oh my God, I'm going to make him sick or whatever.
I got him back to the house and I said, I'm so sorry about that.
These people, referring to my mother and the other people that are there to help him out, he goes, these people don't let me do anything.
So we just had little moments like that where we just got to share some stuff.
And then my schedule has been extremely busy since COVID, but I've been working in other places, Thailand, Malta.
Hungary, England, you know, just constantly working.
But because of what we learned with COVID in terms of being able to just drop in on a TV show, my studio on the farm, we now push a few buttons and I can be live on, you know, a New York Tonight Show.
So I've restructured what I do with press.
You know, I do my junkets at my house, you know.
And I might have a nice shirt here, but just like today, I've got shorts on underneath, and I walk out of, you know, a day of press, and I'm in the bush, you know?
I've got the horses and the cows and the dogs, and I'm, you know, cool.
So it's still changed my life, but it's meant I haven't been here.
So it's been a five-year gap, you know, to flying into New York the other day.
And it's a palpable difference in the way, you know, people regard each other and the way they talk and the fears they express.
You've got to remember that it is the beacon of freedom for everybody in the world.
It's a huge responsibility.
And if people are looking for something to change in their life or something positive, the vast majority of people will look towards America and say, well, that's the beacon.
I want to live like that, where people can say what's on their mind and people can have differing opinions.
People can be of all different races, religions or whatever and still be in the same community.
It's so important that America remains healthy into the future for everyone, not just for Americans.
And my son, Tennyson, is going to be so happy that when he sees my name come up on the list of things, he's going to be very happy.
And I want to just thank you on his behalf.
For being a voice that accepts different opinions and doesn't push a particular agenda, you've definitely helped his brain expand and helped him become curious.