How Russell Crowe snared Cate Blanchett for Robin Hood role
May 6th, 2010 - 5:56 pm ICT by ANI
Melbourne, May 6 (ANI): Russell Crowe managed to hook Cate Blanchett for his next movie in front of a 1000 people.
He and filmmaker Ridley Scott were in the final stages of casting and preparation for the planned 155-million-dollar adventure Robin Hood, and still on the lookout for someone to play the leading lady, Maid Marion.
Crowe made the offer to Blanchett during a ceremony last year for the 2009 Australian Legends Awards when he was asked to give a speech.
“I just asked her in front of 1000 people,” The Daily Telegraph quoted Crowe as saying.
“We were on stage and I’m looking at Cate. I knew her for a handshake and all that, right, but I’d never worked with her or ever had a long and deep conversation with her,” Crowe recalls.
“But I’m looking at this exquisite beauty sitting next to me on stage and they gave me the microphone and I immediately turned to the audience and said, “Don’t you think it’s time me and Cate made a movie together?’And the response was gigantic.
“So when I called her the next day she knew what I was already talking about,” he adds.
Blanchett agreed but she was cautious of the actor’s reputation as a mid-shoot script rewriter.
“We started talking about it and she said, ‘If I read a script, are you promising me that’s the script that you are going to make?”‘ “I’m like, ‘This is Ridley Scott, that isn’t going to happen, but what I can promise you is you are going to work with a great filmmaker who is in love with actors,” Crowe says.
The latest take on the poor’s hero with his band of merry men takes a slightly different turn in this movie. It tells how Robin was abandoned as a boy, grew up in the English Army as an archer and travelled the world on King Richard the Lionheart’s crusades before he returns to a broken nation.
“Do I think Cate Blanchett is the single most spectacular creature that ever walked the planet? Yeah I do,” he says.
“She is absolutely fantastic, an incredible partner in crime on the film set, she just gets it.
“She also gets when Ridley and I are having a few conversations about something we are working towards a solution, not f—ing around with ego bulls— as you may read in 1000 newspaper articles.
“We just work something, man, we just work it and work it until we find a solution,” he adds. (ANI)
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Tags: archer, australian legends, cate blanchett, crusades, daily telegraph, english army, exquisite beauty, filmmaker, handshake, king richard the lionheart, leading lady, lookout, maid marion, melbourne, merry men, microphone, richard the lionheart, ridley scott, robin hood, russell crowe