C’mon…

Last night MTV.com guy Josh Horowitz reported that if and when Nottingham ever gets made, director Ridley Scott intends to have Russell Crowe play both the Sheirff of Nottingham and Robin Hood. Scott revealed that Crowe will be “playing both!” to MTV News during a Body of Lies junket interview over the weekend. Scott explained that Crowe’s dual roles would be “a good old clever adjustment of characters. One becomes the other. It changes.” This isn’t just a terrible idea — it’s an embarassing one. Unless Scott was having Horowitz off.

20 thoughts on “C’mon…

  1. scott was putting the mtv guy on…..
    what crowe said: “we’re taking our time because you don’t want to be doing ‘robin hood’ unless you’re gonna do it really fucking well. it’s gotta be the best one ever done or else we should be doing something else…
    there won’t be tights because, according to our research, they weren’t invented for another three hundred years…i’d like to apoligize to sienna miller…”

  2. Sometimes I feel Ridley Scott wishes he could have Russell Crowe play every role in every film he makes. I’m waiting for the day he inserts Crowe’s performance into Blade Runner in a Lucas-ian bout of revisionist filmmaking.

  3. It’s a pretty brilliant idea. It’s takes the secret identity part of super hero mythos and uses it to tackle the duality of well meaning outlaw hero and the man put in a position to track him down. What if they were the same person? There’s a lot of fun with the elaborate ruse the sheriff must create in order for that to work.
    At the very least, you’ve never seen that version of the Robin Hood story.

  4. Wait, I’m confused. Is it going to be Crowe playing both parts but as two different people, or is the conceit that Robin Hood and Nottingham are the same person, thus making sense the same actor would play both parts? There’s a huge difference between the two. The former is shitty stunt casting, the latter could be interesting. Then again, I recently caught A Good Year on cable. The opening sequence where Crowe is on Wall Street telling his “labrats” to buy, then sell, then buy, then sell again is the absolute nadir of both director and actor’s careers. I can’t believe that film isn’t already a cult “so bad its good” classic.

  5. Considering we’ve had 3 decades of proof that Ridley Scott sucks the teet of hackdom like a vampire, this kind of news should come as no surprise.
    Maybe he can take it one step further by presenting Robin and the Sheriff as lovers, torn apart by their roles in a society that outlaws gay marriage… I definitely think what the world needs is a scene in which Crowe fucks himself in the ass.

  6. You know back in the day, when casting stunts like this didn’t work, they would just reshoot the good guy role with Sir Jerry Reed. No problem.
    But Reed isn’t with us now, folks. Those days have past.

  7. I see Nottingham as fitting into the “villain’s POV” gimmick that we see in, for instance, that Wicked musical.
    The script, at least in the draft I read, was pretty solid. Not great, but pretty good. I think it could be a strong movie.
    Scott may suck the teat of hackdom, but he has managed to make several good movies… Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, Kingdom of Heaven. When he gets a decent script he can usually do all right with it. He’s just not a great action director.

  8. Woah…that’s, like, way deep.
    It’s like about how we’re all good and all evil and who’s to say Robin Hood was all good anyway….yeah, I can dig that vibe.
    To quote Joker, “I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir!”
    Also, I agree Crowe was probably joking.

  9. Please no more love for Kingdom of Heaven on this site. What a waste, no matter what cut you’ve seen.
    If Scott wanted to do another cat-and-mouse outlaw pic, why the hell didn’t he step in and take over Bowden’s Killing Pablo. His best work in the last 20 years was his treatment of Bowden’s Black Hawk Down.

  10. I would pay to see that. I hope there’s a scene where the sheriff flees on horseback with the girl, and Robin Hood’s after them on a motorcycle, and it’s like a battle between motors and horses. Like technology versus horse.

  11. Russell Crowe’s accent already resembles something that would fit in another version Robin Hood… though he’ll probably have to drop some of that girth he developed for Body of Lies

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