“Bryan [Singer,
X-Men director] was a friend at the time and he was really putting the pressure on,” Crowe recently explained in an interview on
Australian TV.
The actor had just finished up filming Ridley Scott’s
Gladiator, and didn’t want to be typecast as, yes, a fan of wolves.
“If you remember, Maximus has a wolf at the centre of his cuirass, and he has a wolf as his companion … which I thought was going to be a bigger deal [at the time]…So I said no, because I didn’t want to be ‘wolfy’, like ‘Mr Wolf’.”