Russell Crowe explains why he thought the original script for ‘Gladiator’ was ‘absolute rubbish’

“Gladiator” may have been a blockbuster hit, but according to star Russell Crowe, the movie’s initial script wasn't up to par with the film's success.

Crowe did a retrospective of his career in an interview with Vanity Fair, and during the video, he took a moment to reflect on the 2000 film.

The actor had already appeared in numerous films in his career before starring in “Gladiator," and he said by that time, he was "confident about my abilities as a leading man.”

“What I wasn’t confident about with ‘Gladiator’ was the world that was surrounding me,” he added. “At the core of what we were doing was a great concept, but the script, it was rubbish, absolute rubbish. And it had all these sort of strange sequences.”

Crowe explained that the “energy around what we were doing was very fractured,” adding, “I did think a couple of times, ‘Maybe my best option is just to get on a plane and get out of here.’”

However, Crowe said that his conversations with the movie's director, Ridley Scott, "gave me faith." Crowe recalled that Scott had assured the actor that nothing would end up in the film that Crowe didn’t “believe in 100%.”

“When we started that film, we had 21 pages of script that we agreed on,” he said, adding that most scripts are usually somewhere between 103 to 110 pages. “So we had a long way to go. We basically used up those pages in the first section of the movie, so by the time we got to our second location, we were catching up.”

During a June 2019 interview on SiriusXM’s “The Howard Stern Show,” Crowe told host Howard Stern that it was “scary as hell” to not have a complete script when filming “Gladiator.”

“I was on my way to the airport a couple of times because it was like, ‘What are we going to do because of all of this expectation and responsibility?’” he said. “And this thing is what I’m good at is learning about s--t and learning my dialogue. If you don’t have a script, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Crowe said that by Scott telling him more about his inspiration for the film, he was able the adopt the mantra, “It’s 184 A.D., you’re a Roman general, and you’ve been directed by Ridley Scott. Just keep turning up to work.”

An unnamed sequel to the original film is slated for a Nov. 22, 2024 release, according to Variety. Scott is set to produce the movie alongside Michael Pruss, Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher, with a script written by David Scarpa.

Crowe recently told Collider that he felt "slightly jealous" about a sequel being released in 2024 because the movie was such a "huge experience" in his life.

"It’s something that changed my life, really," he said. "It changed the way people regarded me and what I do for a living, and, you know, I’ve been very lucky to be involved in lots of big movies, but the legs on that film are incredible."

This article was originally published on TODAY.com