Sure, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah uses more CGI H2O than old-fashioned “water pictures” used to, but that doesn’t mean that star Russell Crowe didn’t spend a lot of time during the shoot completely soaked. In fact, reportedly Crowe was soaked for so long during one day of shooting that he suffered hypothermia, causing the tough actor to… cry?
While shooting scenes off the coast of Iceland, Crowe discovered that he was unable to stop shivering after a particularly grueling day. He reveals, “We were doing a scene in Iceland where I had to fall into the sea… I’d been in and out of the sea, half-naked, filming all day… physically it was very demanding. There were these rain towers in the sky that could flood eight football fields in 30 seconds, and it was constant rain. We had 36 days of it.”
Crowe admits he suffered a sort-of breakdown on the last day of shooting. He says, “It gets to the point where it’s like Chinese water torture. You can’t take it any more. I went into hypothermia. When we wrapped, I was lying on these stones and I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t stop shaking. I couldn’t stop crying.”
The Gladiator star also confesses that he feels that part of the breakdown had to do with his marriage recently ending, adding, “Seven or eight people put blankets on me and sat on me until I stopped. It was crazy – they were hugging me, trying to stop me shaking… This happened just a few weeks after Danielle [Spencer] had told me she didn’t want to be married any more and insisted that we sit in front of our children and tell them. So it was pretty heavy…”
Of course, this is Russell Crowe we’re talking about — the burly actor known for his manly-man roles — so this all lasted only a few moments. He recalls, “Well, suddenly I stopped crying and shaking. I pushed them all off and walked back to my trailer. They were like, ‘Do you want anything?’ and I was like, ‘F**k off! It’s done. Give me a glass of wine.'”
via WENN
