Russell Crowe Remembers Drunkenly Buying A $35,000 Dinosaur Skull Off Leo DiCaprio
If you had unlimited money, you'd eventually end up buying most things. After the obvious stuff - solid gold house, rocket car, vanity football club - you might indulge a few personal intrigues.
You might build a steam railway in your garden. You might set up and headline your own festival. You might sign all of surviving members England's 2002 World Cup squad and see how far up the pyramid you can get with a 39-year-old Michael Owen up front. Sooner or later, though, you're going to end up buying some dinosaur bones. You definitely would.
Russell Crowe definitely did at any rate, and he did it properly: he got absolutely hammered round Leo DiCaprio's house and bought a dinosaur skull off him.
"There was a bunch of vodka involved in that transaction," Crowe told Howard Stern, explaining that he picked up the mosasaur skull as a gift for his kids.
"He was pretty cool about it," Crowe said. "He said, 'Just give me what I paid for it' and I think he paid like thirty or thirty-five [thousand dollars]."
That, Stern noted, seems quite cheap for an actual dinosaur skull, but Crowe pointed out that it was "not a very popular dinosaur". Crowe then went and sold the skull in 2018 for about $45,000 at auction.
Later on, Crowe remembered turning down the chance to play Aragorn in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films and a potential $100 million payday. That's 2,857 mosasaur skulls down the toilet.
Crowe said no, he explained, "because I didn't think Peter Jackson actually wanted me on the film.
"I think he was forced into talking to me [by the studio] because there was a moment in time where everybody wanted me in every [film]."
Jackson didn't say as much to him, but as "a fellow New Zealander" Crowe felt he could hear in his voice that he wasn't 100 per cent into the idea of having Crowe on board.
"My instinct was that he had somebody else in mind," Crowe said, "which turned out to be Viggo."
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