When I joined a Zoom call with Oscar winner Russell Crowe last week, I found the New Zealand-born actor to be friendly, engaging, and downright hilarious. In other words, nothing like his character in the new film Unhinged.
Think of the scariest, most violent movie villain in recent memory, then multiply the scare factor by ten, and you've got Crowe's road raging, unhinged monster of a character. The film is directed by Derrick Borte and produced by Mark Gill, and all three men participated in the virtual interview to try and describe Crowe's character, who is simply called "The Man."
The Man hunts people throughout the film, starting with a young single mother, Rachel, who cuts him off on the road while racing to get her son to school on time. When she refuses to apologize, he warns her that she's "about to find out" what a bad day really is. And so begins his hour and a half of stalking her and terrorizing - and in some cases murdering - her family and friends - both on and off the road.
There doesn't really seem to be a point to his mayhem. We get hints about his recent past - an ex-wife who cheated on him? - but that's it. And Crowe said that's the point.
"I don't think that for me, the backstory of the character is important," Crowe told Townhall. "Because I don't think his actions are justifiable. There can't be a soliloquy where he sort of explains what's happened to him which leads him to this place because his response is fundamentally unjustifiable. We all go through stuff in our lives, peaks, and valleys. We all have good moments and bad moments...the trick to life...is to enjoy it and to go on because there will be better days. And this guy has decided that the sum total of these things lead to this outburst of extreme violence."
"You can mix in 100 different storylines about what has happened to this guy," Crowe added. "You can see the seeds of his resentment, but to go any further with that information is to justify his actions. And his actions are not justifiable."
Crowe pointed out some tragic glimpses of The Man in real life. He used the example of the Las Vegas shooting in 2017 when a man leaned out his hotel room window and killed 58 people enjoying a country music concert. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.
"It's that white hot anger that's the point," Crowe said.
Thankfully, Crowe did not stay in character throughout their time filming. It would have been hard to, considering that they shot the film in the summertime in New Orleans, pre-COVID, and it couldn't have been more casual.
"I spent most of my time making jokes," he said, adding that the set was "super relaxed."
Crowe said that he was currently making his way through dozens of scripts. That gave me a chance to ask him about his strategy when it comes to picking roles. After portraying such a brutal character like The Man, did he try to find a "nice guy" character to play? He said it "doesn't work like that."
"If I read it and I don't have a visceral response, then I'm not doing it," he explained. "It's got to get under my skin in some way."
That was the case with Unhinged. He admitted he "didn't enjoy" his first read, but the script stayed with him to the point he couldn't say no.
Oddly, he said, the role he took after Unhinged was "an even possibly deeper place of darkness," for a film called The Georgetown Project. Yep, another horror film.
"If you look back at what I've done, this is all fresh ground for me," he noted. "If I don't get goosebumps on my skin, then I'm not respecting the gods of film...to me I need to be connected to the material. I can never predict what I'm going to do next."
The same can be said of The Man. Throughout the film it's nearly impossible to guess the next move of this psychotic man behind the wheel.
See the trailer for Unhinged below, now in theaters.
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