Russell Crowe

Turned down the role of Aragorn in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy since filming on Der Herr der Ringe: Die Gefährten (2001) would coincide with Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind: Genie und Wahnsinn (2001). However, Crowe really loved the idea of filming a movie in his home country, New Zealand, for an extended amount of time.

One of the most painful things of the L.A. Confidential (1997) character I played was that the author, James Ellroy, kept telling me that Bud White wasn't a drinker. I said, "Come on, this is 1953. He's a blue-collar bloke, a cop. You're telling me he doesn't sit around with the boys after his shift and have a beer?". And Ellroy says, "Absolutely not." So for five months and seven days, I didn't have a drink. It's probably the most painful period of my life.