This winter, while filming in Budapest, Russell Crowe cycled to work. Every day he’d ride a thick-tyred mountain bike from his rental house to the studio, deliberately taking the hardest route. He’d log his time on social media, trying to beat his record, usually somewhere around 45 minutes: “You’ve gotta be absolutely prepared to get on the bike and just go.” The route has an elevation of 166 metres, and the hardest path is through a dump. When it rains, the water slips through the rubbish and makes a river of bin juice that the wheels of Crowe’s bike would flick up into his mouth. A new mudguard took care of the worst of it, but there have been days when he has arrived at the make-up trailer covered in Budapestian waste. He says he does this to clear his head.

There’s one point in the journey that makes it all worth it: when the gradient changes, and there’s a long downhill stretch. “It’s just so fantastic when you’ve been riding, riding, riding, getting up to that point, and you get to shooom.”

The house itself could be in LA; its bland, brutalist frontage and shiny interior are at odds with the more traditional buildings on the street, including the café on the corner where we met earlier, run by old Hungarian women selling cakes and ice cream. The grass within its garden walls is so perfect it could be plastic. The topiary is shaped like butt plugs for some reason. “I’ve been describing it as an Eastern European drug dealer’s bordello,” Crowe laughs, apologising for the place as he invites me in. “I don’t know if that’s accurate.”

This is where Crowe has been staying during production of Nuremberg, in which he plays the Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring. It’s the tail end of a hectic period of acting for him, with five films out this year, including The Exorcism, Sleeping Dogs and Sony’s forthcoming supervillain flick Kraven the Hunter. Soon, he’ll be returning to his farm in rural Australia – to his family and his 220 cows – before embarking on a European tour with his band, Indoor Garden Party, this summer. (They’re playing Glastonbury.)

The eyes that drew you into the interior life of an Australian skinhead or a Roman gladiator are still pretty, but he has a new, worn cragginess. I ask how he felt to see his entire face for the first time since 2019, when he shaved only weeks ago to play Göring. “Have you ever seen one of those documentaries where James Cameron takes a camera down to the Mariana Trench and you see these really weird-looking fish? It was kind of like that,” he says. “Took a number of days for my puckered skin to fucking come back to looking human.”

Read more at British GQ.