Russell Crowe had doubts about Gladiator

Russell Crowe had reservations about starring in 'Gladiator'.

The 59-year-old actor won an Oscar for his portrayal of Roman General Maximus Decimus Meridius in the hit film but was unsure about appearing in Sir Ridley Scott's historical epic as he believed that the script was "rubbish".

Speaking to Vanity Fair, Russell said: "At the core of what we were doing was a great concept, but the script was rubbish, absolute rubbish. It had all these sort of strange sequences.

"One of them was about chariots and how famous gladiators – and this is all true – used certain types of chariots and how famous gladiators had endorsement deals for olive oil and things like that, and it's all true, but it's just not going to ring right to a modern audience, they're going to, 'What the f*** is all this?'"

Russell admits that he considered walking away from the movie and it was only discussions with the director that convinced him to remain a part of the film.

'The Pope's Exorcist' star said: "The energy around what we were doing was very fractured. I did think a couple of times maybe my best option was just to get on a plane and get out of there.

"It was my continued conversations with Ridley that gave me faith, he said to me at one point in time, 'Mate, we're not committing anything to camera you don't believe in 100 per cent.'

"So, when we actually started that film, we had 21 pages of script that we agreed on. A script is usually between 103-110 pages or something like that, so we had a long way to go, and we basically used up those pages in the first section of the movie."