How do you find an actor of Russell Crowe's caliber to play against him? Well, Ridley Scott seems to have found the answer: let the Oscar winner play both roles! That's right, in one of the odder casting ideas in at least a few days (it just so happens this news comes in the same week Johnny Depp signed on to play Tonto), Crowe is going to play both the sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood himself in Ridley Scott's upcoming flick, "Nottingham."
The news comes straight from the helmer himself, with Scott revealing "He's playing both!" exclusively to MTV News during an interview for his new film "Body of Lies," which co-stars Crowe. While Scott held additional details close to his chest -- saying they would take too long to describe -- he did exclaim that Crowe's dual roles would be "a good old clever adjustment of characters. One becomes the other. It changes."
It's certainly not news that Crowe is playing the sheriff in this revisionist take on the Robin Hood legend (i.e. maybe that dastardly sheriff wasn't the evil guy we all thought he was). He signed on a long while back for the title role. But the casting of the Robin Hood character was rumored to involve names like Christian Bale, not Crowe again.
Clearly Scott sees these two characters as two sides of the same coin, but will audiences find his method plausible? I mean, is Russell going to simply have a goatee as the sheriff and a pointy green hat as Robin to differentiate for the audience? It's certainly a daring move for Crowe and Scott who will be collaborating for the fifth time on the project.
How does this strange casting gambit strike you? It took both Kevin Costner and Alan Rickman to play this pair way back when. Does Crowe have the chops to do it all by himself?
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