Russell Crowe won't choose between music and movies

7 December 2017

Russell Crowe was pressured to give up his musical aspirations once he became famous as an actor.

Russell Crowe

The 'Gladiator' star made his name on the big screen from the late 1990s onward with roles in 'L.A. Confidential', 'Gladiator' and 'A Beautiful Mind' among others.

But Crowe's first love was music and he performed in bands throughout the 1980s and now plays with his band Indoor Garden Party, and although people want to pigeonhole him he rejects the notion he should have to choose between his two passions.

Speaking to Ken Bruce on UK station BBC Radio 2, he said: "That's the biggest question I get asked all the time, 'Which would you choose, one or the other?'

"And it's like ... I just don't have to make that decision. I know when I got really famous a lot of people put pressure on me to not do music anymore. I think one journalist said he couldn't understand why I had the need to be even more famous. It's like, that's never been the end goal."

Rather than slowing down, 53-year-old Crowe wants to work more and more and he is very ambitious to develop as a songwriter, something he thinks he's achieved on Indoor Garden Party's latest album 'The Musical'.

He added: "I think with the current Indoor Garden Party album, someway somehow for some reason I've written the album that I probably should've written when I was 23 or 24, but pop music in its beauty wasn't attractive to me then. Writing songs where all the verses were the same length wasn't attractive to me. I would even write songs where every chorus was different."

Crowe previously insisted he has no apprehensions about performing with his band, because he has always felt "comfortable" as a musician and isn't intimated by audiences.

He shared: "It was strange for me when I got famous and people implied that I shouldn't do music any more because now that I'm famous I shouldn't try to be more famous.

"The fact that I've worked in bands since I was 14, I was in musical theatre from a young age, and all that, the stage is a place I'm extremely comfortable with."