Russell Crowe thinks someone is playing a joke on him by giving him two non-sporty sons.
The 50-year-old actor has Charles, 11, and eight-year-old Tennyson with his estranged wife Danielle Spencer. Russell loves everything about fatherhood, especially that he would never have been able to guess what his children would be like.
“Oh God, I wish I had sporty boys,” he joked on TV show Good Morning Britain. “They come from generation after generation of sportsmen… you’ve got golf champions, tennis champions, my dad was a brutal little soccer player. And now you’ve got my two, and they are so cerebral. It’s a completely different thing, so I think somebody’s playing a joke on me!”
Many people talk about how much having kids changes them and that is something Russell acutely experienced. Every day something happens which makes him think that, and it is one of the reasons why he wanted to direct his latest movie The Water Diviner. It’s about a father who travels to Turkey after the Battle of Gallipoli in the hope of finding his three sons, who are missing.
“As soon as you become a parent, then you see the world through that prism. It never changes once you’re a parent,” he explained. “Yeah, for sure I read this and it just… off the page, it was a page one love story. I ate the script, I didn’t read it. And I was just absolutely certain that the only person who could do this justice is me. I wanted to be responsible for it, I wanted to take control.”
Helming the project had other plus points for Russell. He relished the chance to have a new experience on set, even though he also stars as Connor in it.
“You get so involved and then you arrive [on set] and you realise, ‘Oh my God, I don’t have to put make-up today! Cool, I don’t have to put on funny clothes I can just, like, actually fully concentrate on the frame and all that,’” he laughed. “For me, that was the most exciting thing. I used to think I had the best job in the world and then I discovered this. It suits me down to the ground. You know I’ve been doing lead roles in feature films for 25 years. I’ve been in front of the camera since 1970. I speak this language.”
