‘I have one Oscar, who needs two?’: Russell Crowe bats away awards chatter for Hermann Göring role in ‘Nuremberg’

Russell Crowe has batted away talk about the possibility of securing an Oscar nomination for his role as Hermann Göring in James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg.

“I have one [Oscar], who needs two?,” said Crowe during a masterclass talk at the Zurich Film Festival (ZFF), where Nuremberg had its European premiere last night (September 27).

Crowe was interviewed on stage by ZFF festival director Christian Jungen, who predicted that the actor would receive an Oscar nomination for playing the Nazi politician and general in Nuremberg.

The film chronicles the true story of the post-World War II Nuremberg trials and centres on an American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, played by Remy Malek, who is tasked with determining whether Nazi prisoners are fit to stand trial – and finds himself in a complex battle of wits with Hitler’s right hand man Göring.

Crowe, who previously won a best actor Oscar for his role in 2000’s Gladiator, suggested that he would prefer not to enter the “bullshit” of Oscars campaigning: “My life is so good right now – so good - because nobody really gives that much of a shit. But I still appreciate the work.”

He said that audiences were discovering his past work on streamers like Netflix and Amazon Prime, citing 2010 Paul Haggis film The Next Three Days.

“This stuff fantastic is for me, because people miss it…then 11 years later, it goes to number one on Netflix. Beautiful. Thank you very much. My relationship is now back with the audience. It’s back with the people who actually see movies, and I’m totally happy. It’s that kind of LA Confidential level thing, where you get into nightclubs, you get a nice table at a restaurant.” 

“People look up to you, but there’s no bullshit. Oscars, there’s lots of bullshit. So my preference is that I don’t ever get to that situation again. I have one, who needs two,” he said, to laughter from the Zurich audience.

Crowe also talked about his reasons for boarding Nuremberg and the challenges of bringing it to the screen. “Nuremberg was a beautiful script. It was very well balanced, and to me it gave a great insight into this moment of history and I connected to it immediately.”

Crowe said he first signed on to the film in 2019. “Then they lost their finances. I had to wait. And then it got back together again, and they lost it a second time. They lost for the third time. It took five years for the film to actually come together, and that five years is on top of the seven years it had taken Jamie Vanderbilt to get to that point where he sent it to me.”

“So sometimes you just have to be very patient. You just have to wait…but with Nuremberg, I just felt it in my water. I felt a confidence in James, a love for the script and a fascination for the character.”

Crowe admitted that he was glad when the shoot was over though, saying he found playing Goring haunting. “But that’s the place you have to go to if you want to do it properly, you have to allow it to get under your skin, and that’s just the way you do it.”

Asked how he walked the fine line between making Goring magnetic and charismatic, but not too sympathetic, Crowe said: “I think the sympathetic thing takes care of itself, because of who he is, what he did and who he was connected to. So, you’re never going to be fully sympathetic to that man. But trying to put a little bit of truth on the table as well - because not everybody is all evil and not everybody is all good - that’s one of the things that Jamie Vanderbilt the director allowed me to follow through on. You can enjoy [Goring’s] company, but he will still remind you, because he can’t help it of who he truly is.”

Nuremberg is produced by Bluestone Entertaintment and Walden Media, with Sony Pictures Classics handling its US release in November.

Crowe also paid tribute to Vanderbilt, who wrote, directed and produced Nuremberg, and whose writing credits include Zodiac (2007), Independence Day: Resurgence (2016) and Scream (2022), as well as creating Netflix’s Murder Mystery franchise starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston.

Nuremberg is Vanderbilt’s second feature as a director after 2015’s Truth, starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford. Crowe said the next five to ten years would see “some incredible work from him” as a director.

“The thing with Jamie is that he has produced a bunch of stuff. He’s written a bunch of stuff, like Zodiac, but he’s also done a lot of favours for people, where he goes in and fix the scripts and he doesn’t get credit…So he’s already in a situation where everybody in town owes him a bunch of favours. And now he’s done this, and he’s really put down his cards on the table, saying, I’m a director to be reckoned with.”

“On a daily basis, Jamie would find the time to talk about what we’re doing. We would search for the little, special pieces of every single thing we’re about to do, because he was that focused. Nothing felt rushed with Jamie. Nothing felt like it was in panic… Working with him, from my perspective, was an absolute dream. I really, really enjoyed his company, his sense of humour. I enjoyed challenging him, and I enjoyed the fact that he rose to those challenges. He wanted the movie to be great, and sometimes that means you have to sort of disagree about something for a minute, until you both see each other’s perspectives. I could not speak any more highly about Jamie Vanderbilt as a director. He was fantastic.”

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