Crowe hacks it; Film of the Week: State Of Play.

Byline: Lisa Williams 

IF ANYONE in show business has a reputation that precedes them, it's Russell Crowe.

Rumours of his temper and stubbornness have been rife during his decade or so in the spotlight. While some celebrities bask in the media attention, Russell has made it clear he dislikes being photographed or written about.

Does this explain why he was so eager to take up director Kevin Macdonald's offer to play journalist Cal McAffrey in the film version of hit BBC drama STATE OF PLAY? Calmer and funnier in the flesh, the 45-year-old actor insists not.

"My personal experience doesn't negate my opinion that journalism can be a noble profession, it doesn't dissipate my love of a well-constructed sentence so I liked the idea of going through this experience," he says thoughtfully.

It was lucky that he did like the idea, as Macdonald did not have long to convince him to play the role. Brad Pitt was signed up to play Cal but he pulled out just before shooting.

Macdonald, who later said he thought Brad was perhaps too charming and good looking to pull off the role, stepped straight on to a plane to Australia and bagged Russell.

So did the Oscar-winning actor mind playing a bit of a loser? "Cal doesn't have a shred of vanity for how he looks, how he lives, what he eats and what his lifestyle is. His vanity is in the perception of his words and, at the end of the day, he wants people to see him through the prism of his words," he says.

The original drama has been updated to suit the modern political and journalistic environment - the setting has been changed from London to Washington DC, and the internal newspaper politics have been replaced by a face-off between an old-fashioned pen-and-paper journalist (Cal) and a publish-itbefore-you've-checked-facts blogger (Della, played by Rachel McAdams).

Russell himself is concerned about the state of modern journalism and how stories can be twisted.

"If you trivialise the news decade after decade and if you turn news into entertainment, if you corrupt how people get information, if you have a cynical view where you can take a bit of fluff that's not true and you know it's not true but you can bang it out to make something that fits nicely on page five next to the ad for women's lingerie, if you start thinking like that, then sooner or later people are going to distrust what those sources all are," he says.

State Of Play also looks at the intricate power relations between politicians, business and journalism - and comes to some unsavoury conclusions.

"Many of the things I think need to be put on the breakfast table for discussion are within this movie," Russell says.

"The blurred line between news and entertainment, the blurred line and the secret handshakes between politics and journalism, the privatisation of war. There's a myriad of subjects that this movie covered that I thought were relevant and important." Now Russell's looking forward to working with Ridley Scott on the Robin Hood revisionist tale Nottingham.

The project has been dogged with problems: from the leaves on the "Sherwood Forest" location not being green enough for Scott, to swapping Sienna Miller with Cate Blanchett as Maid Marian (though Russell describes fellow Aussie Cate as his "first choice")..

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NOT SUCH A SLOW NEWS DAY: Russell Crowe (Cal McAffrey) and Rachel McAdams (Della Frye)