Russell Crowe says The Mummy reboot will “scare the sh*t out of you”

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Last week it was reported that Russell Crowe was in talks with Universal to play Dr. Jekyll in the studio's classic movie monsters universe, and during an interview with Collider, the actor confirmed that he will be making a cameo appearance as the character in Alex Kurtzman's THE MUMMY reboot. Crowe, who is out promoting Shane Black's THE NICE GUYS, also said he's excited to work with Tom Cruise.

I’m gonna play Dr. Henry Jekyll, Fellow of the Royal Society. 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 say that he's very confident in Kurtzman's directing abilities before teasing that the reboot is “designed to seriously scare the shit out of you.”

He really understands the world and he’s been around a long time, on a lot of big projects. He knows how to get something from an idea on the page onto a soundstage and into a camera. Sure, I would imagine he’s scared shitless 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 they’re explosive like that from the first time you start talking, and somebody says something that goes off in your mind and that bumps up something that you say 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.

I, for one, hope that I will be leaving the theater both moist and stinky from fright after watching THE MUMMY, but I'm still not completely sold on the reboot, or Universal's plans for a shared cinematic universe featuring their iconic movie monsters. How high or low are your expectations for the planned films?

THE NICE GUYS will theaters on May 20th, while THE MUMMY is scheduled to open on June 9, 2017.