Word: wigand
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Time for a cigarette break, mate," says Russell Crowe, settling down with a pack of Benson & Hedges Milds to talk about his role in The Insider. Wait a minute. A cigarette break? Isn't Crowe playing Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco-industry executive who blew the whistle on his bosses, helped spark a billion-dollar court battle, and now teaches the evils of cigarettes to kids? Crowe smiles apologetically. "I love irony, lovey," he says in his Aussie accent and lights up another cigarette...
...play the pudgy 53-year-old biochemist at the heart of The Insider--age didn't matter. At the time, Crowe was 34 and in fighting trim from playing ice hockey for the film Mystery, Alaska. But Mann had an inkling that Crowe could connect with the whistle blower Wigand at his most depressed and paranoid, when the tobacco industry was trying to smear him, when his marriage was failing, when he was drinking and eating too much. Crowe, without even meeting Wigand, nailed the part in a single reading, says Mann. "He was truly in the moment...
...prepare for the role, Crowe perfected his American accent, put on 50 lbs. and dyed his hair seven times; then, when he still didn't look old enough, he shaved his head for a wig. Getting inside Wigand's head was more difficult. The two men spent less than two days together in South Carolina, golfing and talking about Wigand's new passion--teaching kids about the addictive ways of tobacco. "He makes it very hard for you to like him. He just doesn't care that much," says Crowe, who feels no need to win friends either. "The thing...
...time filming started, Crowe was Wigand, with folds of fat around his face. He even waddled like Wigand. Marie Brenner, the Vanity Fair writer whose article inspired The Insider, was astonished to see Wigand on the set one day. It was Crowe, of course. "I saw Wigand for two months in 1996, when he was shattered, frightened, in his darkest time," she recalls. "Yet this actor, after a day of golf, was able to intuit his throttled energy, his tension." Hollywood is equally impressed by the actor. Ridley Scott cast Crowe as the lead in next spring's Gladiator...
...hero here is Jeffrey Wigand. As played so acutely by Russell Crowe, he is a sullen, stocky, difficult fellow, a Hamlet whose soliloquies have to be read in his nervous blinks and stammers, in the latticework under his tired, wary eyes. They are all the hints we need to detect a soul swamped in ethical dilemmas. When Crowe gets to command the screen, The Insider comes to roiled life. It's an All the President's Men in which Deep Throat takes center stage, an insider prodded to spill the truth...