He has played a gladiator, a whistleblower, a genius, a policeman and everything in between but he has not portrayed the Tolkien knight Aragorn, has old Crowe, and this is because after being offered the role he could sense a certain hesitancy in Peter Jackson's voice. Russell Crowe recently revealed this in an interview with British lifestyle magazine GQ, when he said
"I was a big Tolkien reader when I was a kid, so I got quite excited about the idea of Lord of the Rings. But I very much felt the studio were making that decision, not the film director. And I talked to Peter Jackson over the phone, and he wasn't saying the sort of things that directors were saying to you if they were really trying to attract you to a project. And I just kind of got a sense that he already had somebody else in mind that he wanted to do. And me stepping forward and saying yes was actually going to get in his way. We come from the same place, so there's a nuance in that conversation that other people might not hear -we're both New Zealanders - in his own way without him saying anything negative, that he had another plan. So I just left it at that"
<social>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tEz-Si5-VQ</social>
The casting of Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn is probably the best in all three Lord of the Rings films, which of course means that Crowe made the right decision.
Or what do you say?