From today’s cracker of an interview with actor Russell Crowe, by Jennifer Byrne in The Bulletin:


“You tell me to piss off too many times and I
probably will … I don’t mind shrinking my professional life. I don’t
mind taking those targets off my head. But you know I’m not going to
become a false thing to satisfy anybody else for any reason. I do it
straight, I do it from the heart and if that’s not good enough, then I
just won’t do it.

“Of course you shouldn’t get pissed off, of
course I shouldn’t have thrown something at him, but it’s a two-way
street. I might have overreacted to a situation, but I was in bed
trying to go to sleep. You think I went to put my pants on and go down
to the foyer and go ‘What the f*ck are you talking about’ to some
bloke? Do you really think I want to do that? Come on.

“You
front me as a bloke like that, you’d better be prepared to back it up.
Or apologise, and do the thing I asked you to do. I’m going to respond
like that.

“Ceteris paribus decorum tremens … All
things being equal, keep your head … If they’re not equal do whatever
the fuck you need to do to bring them to equal. That’s the tenet of my
life.

“It’s OK for you to get pissed off, why isn’t it OK for me to get pissed off?

“Do
you have any idea the level of personal control that I have, to get to
where I am? Any idea at all? This thing of being a smoking gun, this
lit fuse, it’s just bollocks … Vincit qui se vincit: he conquers who conquers himself.”

Read the full profile in The Bulletinhere.