Sipping on a Red Stripe, Crowe nods toward a mechanical bull in the center of the room. He drags on one of an endless carcinogenic daisy chain of Marlboro Lights (The Insider smokes? "I'm a great fan of irony," he says). Then he riffs in his molasses-thick Down Under accent: "You know what the saying is, mate? If you want to be a bull rider, you get a handful of marbles—glass ones, preferably—and put 'em in your mouth. Then you get a hammer and smack yourself on the back of the head. And every time you smack yourself you spit out one of the marbles. And when all your marbles are gone you get on the f---ing bull."

What the hell does that mean?

"When you've lost your marbles, man. You know that saying?"

Crowe is flush with these kinds of colorful, byzantinely Aussie epigrams. At one point a starstruck waiter virtually begs Crowe if he can get him anything, to which Crowe replies, "If I could get another Red Stripe, I'd be sweet as a biscuit."

Sweet as a biscuit.

The fact that Crowe's hotel is right across the street from this joint with the mechanical bull is also "sweet as a biscuit." And whenever you happen to say something Crowe likes, he'll smile, nod thanks, and say, "Rock and roll." It's not even humanly possible to keep track of how often he says "mate."

Crowe was always Scott's first choice to play Maximus—the Roman general who's betrayed by the emperor Marcus Aurelius' son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) and exiled, only to fight his way to Rome as a vengeful gladiator. "I noticed him way back in Romper Stomper," says Scott of Crowe's 1993 turn as a menacingly realistic neo-Nazi skinhead. Asked what he saw in Crowe in that film, Scott utters one word: "Animal."

Crowe, however, had to be talked into accepting Maximus; for one thing, he thought the script needed a serious overhaul. On the Mississippi set of The Insider, Crowe wasn't sure he liked Gladiator's "semi-cynical take on life in ancient times" at the expense of a fleshed-out hero's journey. "The concept was really interesting, but I was deeply into [The Insider]." Then one morning Insider director Michael Mann "comes in while I was getting my makeup put on and says, 'I know you're focused on this role, and I appreciate it because it's my movie. But I just want to stick something in your head—and that is that Ridley Scott is one of the top 2 percent of shooters in the history of cinema.'" Crowe laughs. "So after that I was like 'S---, I better get on the phone and move this monkey along.'"

Crowe soon had weightier matters to worry about. To play The Insider's Big Tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, Crowe packed on 38 pounds of Method flab thanks to a strictly unstrict diet of cheeseburgers and whiskey; he now faced the challenge of shaping his doughy physique into the body of a Roman warrior. "I didn't think it would take that long," he laughs. "But after five weeks of working out I'd dropped only five pounds.... My blood pressure and cholesterol were at dangerously high levels and it occurred to me that what I was doing was probably quite silly because my body was taking the weight gain seriously. My body didn't say, 'Oh, it's just a role.'"