David Hemmings On Going Pint-For-Pint With Russell Crowe On Ridley Scott's Gladiator
It was the film that made sword-and-sandal epics cool again. But as it turned its leading man into a star, so Gladiator gave several old hands a last chance to raise hell.
“I had an absolute ball on Gladiator.”
David Hemmings hasn’t been with us for almost 20 years but just the memory of his booming, brandy-soaked voice brings him roaring back to life.
“Oliver Reed and Richard Harris were two of my oldest friends and to find us all working on the same picture was marvelous. And to find us all still alive was miraculous!”
A huge star in the 1960s thanks to films like Blow-Up and Barbarella, David Hemmings had all but given up acting by the late 1990s. Still, when top director Ridley Scott asked him to play the Roman senator Cassius, he was quick to accept.
As he explained in 2002, “I was pretty much done with acting before Ridley rang. Producing and directing, they were my thing. By that time, I’d played all the great roles and I couldn’t see any more around the corner. But as someone who grew up loving epics like Ben-Hur and The Robe, I couldn’t say ‘no’. And when I found out who else was involved, I couldn’t have been more delighted.”
Having made a number of films with Oliver Reed and shared plenty of pints with Richard Harris, Hemmings reveled in the hell-raising opportunities Gladiator presented.
“Oliver was a dear, dear friend. I was with him in Malta when he died which was a terrible thing. But to be on the picture with him, enjoying the odd loosener and chatting about old times – the birds we’d nicked off each other, the hangovers we’d fought together – that was just wonderful.
“And as for Harris, when I bumped into him on the first day on set, he said, ‘David! How the devil are you? Had lunch with Peter O’Toole yesterday. I said to him ‘Peter – chaps like us, after all we’ve done, we should be dead, shouldn’t we?’ He looked at me and said, ‘But, Richard, we already are!’”
But what of Russell Crowe? Was his reputation for bad behavior well deserved? “Russell’s a good chap and he knows his way around a pint. But he couldn’t keep up with me, Harris and Oliver on Gladiator. And if he’d try to run with us in our pump, it would have finished him. We were the best!”