Russell Crowe has confirmed that he will play Dr Jeykll in the upcoming reboot of The Mummy. It was rumoured last week that Crowe would join Tom Cruise in the first of Universal’s monster movie franchise, and the actor has now spoken about his decision to take on the role as the tortured scientist.
In an interview with Collider to promote his latest film The Nice Guys, Crowe revealed his involvement in the movie. “I’m gonna do it,” he said. “I’m gonna play Dr. Henry Jekyll. 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. 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 [Kidman].”
Crowe went on to speak about Kurtzman’s approach to The Mummy, which will kick off an ongoing, connected universe centred around the studio’s monster movie properties. “He knows how to get something from an idea on the page onto a soundstage and into a camera,” he said. “Sure, I would imagine he’s scared sh*tless 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 somebody says something that goes off in your mind 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.”
Last week, it was revealed that Universal is planning a monster movie every year until at least 2019. The Mummy is set for release in June 2017, with two more as-yet-untitled films scheduled for April 2018 and February 2019.
Johnny Depp is rumoured to be playing The Invisible Man in a future film, and it is expected that Crowe will reprise his role in a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde movie. Other key monsters that are expected to be brought back include The Wolfman, Van Helsing, Dracula, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Frankenstein.