Russell Crowe talks ‘The Mummy with Alex Kurtzman, will scare the crap out of you
While promoting his new film The Nice Guys with Ryan Gosling, Russell Crowe spoke about the news of him joining Tom Cruise for the new Mummy reboot.
“I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna play Dr. Henry Jekyll, Fellow of the Royal Society. It’s very interesting, what they’re gonna do with that stuff. I’ve had a couple of chats about it with the director (Alex Kurtzman). I’ve known Tom Cruise since 1992, or something like that,” Crowe told Collider, before joking about Cruise’s divorce from Nicole Kidman.
“When he was married to an Australian, I was really good friends with him. But when he got divorced, I was part of the settlement package, and I went to Nicole.”
When asked about Kurtzman, the Gladiator star said that “He really understands the world and he’s been around a long time, on a lot of big projects. He knows how to get something from an idea on the page onto a sound stage and into a camera. Sure, I would imagine he’s scared s***less right about now, and having a hard time sleeping because he’s got ten million things on his mind right now. But when we started talking about this idea, there were a few things I put up in the air and he picked up on them. Those kinds of creative collaborative conversations, if they’re explosive like that from the first time you start talking, and somebody says something that goes off in your mind and that bumps up something that you say and that other person bounces off of that, you’re actually in a really good place. How they’ve pulled all of this stuff forward into a contemporary world and how they’re building it out from there, and how all of the different character interweave into each other’s stories, it’s fantastic.”
Joining Cruise and Crowe in The Mummy will be Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: The Secret Service) playing a female creature as the title reflects with Annabelle Wallis rumored to be playing either a scientist or an archaeologist, and scriptwriter Jon Spaihts has written a role specifically for Jake Johnson (Jurassic World) to be used as comedy relief.
Courtney B. Vance has been cast in an unknown role. He played attorney Johnnie Cochran on The People v. O.J. Simpson, is perhaps best known for his roles in Law & Order: Criminal Intent and The Hunt for Red October.
Crowe addressed the question if this new film will be different that the previous Mummy films: “Yeah. I think this one is more designed to seriously scare the s**t out of you.”
Universal is attempting to build an overlapping franchise starring the Classic Monsters similar to the Marvel Universe. Next up is a new version of The Invisible Man that will star Johnny Depp, a reboot of Van Helsing, some sort of remake of The Bride of Frankenstein, and The Wolfman.
The Mummy movie has a release date of June 9, 2017.