Russell Crowe’s publicist has two pieces of information she wishes to impart before I’m ushered into the actor’s hotel suite. The first is a warning that Crowe “may be smoking” during the interview, about which I couldn’t care less, beyond wondering how much it is costing him to have a ciggie. Clearly whatever eye-watering charges Claridge’s levies against those who break the hotel’s smoking ban are but a mere bagatelle to the highest-paid actor in the world – one who has reportedly earned $82m (£55m) at the box office in the past year. The second is that Crowe is “on good form, very talkative”. It’s said brightly, but is clearly intended as reassurance. The one thing everybody knows about Crowe, other than the fact that he was nominated for the best actor Oscar three years in a row, winning it in 2000 for Gladiator, is that he has a fractious relationship with the press. For the prospective interviewer, Googling his name is quite the nerve-jangling experience: testimonies from other hacks that he offered “the worst interview experience ever”, tales of bitter Twitter spats and surly stormings out.

As it turns out, the publicist is right on both counts. Seated on a sofa, wearing a tracksuit, Crowe, 50, is making his way though a packet of Benson & Hedges with the kind of determination you seldom see these days, especially among Hollywood stars. And he does appear to be on good form. In fact, he is the very model of gruff antipodean charm: so antipodean in fact that at one point he uses the phrase “fair dinkum” entirely unironically. He talks cheerfully about everything from the difference between his brand of intensive, immersive preparation for a role and the kind of method acting that requires staying in character between takes (the former is about “giving over time to the contemplation of what you’re going to do and respecting cinema as an art from”, the latter is apparently “a load of old shit”), to his apparent refusal to do commercials or endorse products, a stance that led to a well-publicised spat with George Clooney over Nespresso coffee-makers. “Look, there will possibly come a time when I start doing commercials and you’ll know then that I’ve just given up. Other people can do whatever they want. It’s just my thing. But it’s just reaping, you know? We’re supposed to play different characters. We’re not supposed to lock ourselves and become an icon. I have a …” His voice trails off. “A certain opinion about that level of vanity,” he says, picking his words carefully. In fact, the only time he shuts a question down – he doesn’t want to talk about his audience with the pope that came about as a result of his performance in the biblical epic Noah – he’s virtually apologetic: “Is it OK with you if we leave that one? I’d rather, if that’s OK.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russell Crowe talks about The Water Diviner

I would love to tell you that my winning personality and expertly researched questions have somehow broken through Crowe’s fearsome public image to reveal the fair dinkum bloke underneath. But, this week at least, he seems to be behaving like that towards everybody. His latest visit to London has been one long charm offensive. He does a star turn on the Jonathan Ross Show. He appears on Lauren Laverne’s radio show and subsequently tweets that she’s “the hottest thing on radio” and should have her own TV series. A few hours later, he’s back tweeting about how much he enjoyed appearing in the Sun. Perhaps Crowe’s public image is unwarranted.

Without wishing to excuse his errant behaviour where members of the public have been concerned – it really doesn’t look good when a multimillionaire actor throws a phone at a hotel concierge, or gets in a brawl with a businessman in a London restaurant, the latter punch-up apparently necessitating the intervention of Ross Kemp – it’s hard not to notice that most of his sudden, piqued departures from interviews have been precipitated by the interviewer telling him that he couldn’t act properly, or sing, or do accents. A cynic might suggest that it’s almost as if they’re deliberately trying to wind him up in order to generate juicy copy. “They want to spark you up, so you go: ‘OK, I’ll spark up, mate. Is that good for you? Did you enjoy that?’” he says. “Same thing happens with photographers. How many times has it been printed that I hit a photographer or slapped a photographer? I’ve never, ever in my life touched a photographer. Some of the cruellest things I’ve ever said have been to photographers who are chasing me down the street, some of the sharpest, most efficient emotional barbs. And they know that in that moment, in that one-to-one wit competition, they just got smashed. But will they admit that? Will they go back to their editor and say: ‘Actually, I got fucking killed by him, he ripped me apart?’” No, they don’t. They turn it into a physical thing. They pretend, you know?”

His problems with the press really began in the wake of Gladiator. He says he rather enjoyed his first flush of American fame, after his performance as the thuggish cop Bud White in LA Confidential, which turned out to be an archetypical Crowe role: a tormented tough guy, whose handiness with his fists masks deeper sensitivities. The fame that came after his Oscar win, however, was “a pain in the arse”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Kim Basinger in LA Confidential. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros

“Even walking down the street was a pain in the arse. People want a piece of you. And something else happens, man. You build all these friendships and then you hit a certain level within the business and those people need you now, if you’re connected to their thing, their thing gets done, their life is enriched, and friendships get damaged because you say no. Suddenly I was destroying people’s hopes and dreams if I said no to something. It was rather intense.”

The zenith of Crowe’s fame does sound a bit disturbing in other ways. For one thing, he found himself on the receiving end of repeated nuisance calls from, of all people, Michael Jackson. “For two or three fucking years,” he says. “I never met him, never shook his hand, but he found out the name I stayed in hotels under, so it didn’t matter where I was, he’d ring up do this kind of thing, like you did when you were 10, you know. ‘Is Mr Wall there? Is Mrs Wall there? Are there any Walls there? Then what’s holding the roof up? Ha ha.’ You’re supposed to grow out of doing that, right?”

There was also the then little-known terrorist organisation al-Qaida threatening to kidnap him in 2001. “I still really don’t know to this day what the fuck that was all about. All I know is, I arrived in LA, got to my hotel, as I’d done umpteen times before, started unpacking, and there was a knock at the door and a team of FBI guys wanted to sit down and discuss something with me. And then, for nearly two years, they were always around. I remember going to the Golden Globes and having, like, 16 security guys with me. I don’t even know why. They wouldn’t give me any details. And of course, people were like: ‘Look at him, he thinks he’s fucking Elvis.’ And then one day they just weren’t there any more.”

Things are substantially calmer now, he says – he just walked from the hotel to get a coffee and that wasn’t a pain in the arse at all. Crowe is in London being charm itself because he has something to sell: his directorial debut, The Water Diviner, in which he also plays the titular lead, an Australian farmer who travels to Turkey after the first world war to retrieve the bodies of his three sons from the battlefields of Gallipoli. If nothing else, he’s admirably blunt about it: “I need it to be commercially successful. I’ve got to return a commercial result on The Water Diviner because that will give me the freedom to do what I want. It’s already been hugely successful in Australia, but I’ve still got a way to go around the world, to get to the point where it’s actually making a commercial return.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Crowe in Gladiator, 2000. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Crowe is clearly passionate about directing. He says he turned down the opportunity to direct a film in the wake of Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind because: “I realised that there were a lot of people attached to that particular gig that weren’t there because they thought I had any particular perspective or anything to bring as a director, they were on board because I was a famous bastard.” He talks with evident pride about putting his fellow actors in The Water Diviner through what he calls “a very concentrated tertiary education in what it is to prepare for cinema” at his farm in New South Wales. It sounds more like what goes on at one of those camps where desperate American parents send errant teenagers: “There’s dawn wake-ups, long walks, yoga, different types of sporting events, gym stuff, lectures nightly about the geopolitical situation in the year we’re dealing with, or the history of the Ottoman Empire. There’s hours and hours of weapons training, there’s just marching relentlessly through the bush, there’s digging trenches day after day until their hands are covered in blisters and bleeding. You take them on a 50km bicycle ride and at the end of the 50km bicycle ride, you put them under some other physical duress, then you put them under a mental duress, then you take them down to archery and say: ‘You must shoot three bullseyes in a row or you don’t eat. You know, it’s your choice: you either concentrate now and you eat and relax, or you don’t.”

That sounds bloody awful. “Well, to a man, the day that we were ready to shoot, they walked in the door and it’s like everything about them is the character. The physicality is there – they’re a different shape. There’s a mile deep behind their eyes of all the things they know about the time period, the subject matter, who their character is.”

One of the reasons he wants to direct more films is because his ideas are largely set in Australia, which means he gets to work nearer to home: his two sons are at school in Sydney. He was never tempted to move to LA, even at the height of his success: “It’s not healthy as me for an individual, to sleep in the office. There’s an ease that I have living in Australia. The best things about Sydney are free: the sunshine’s free and the harbour’s free and the beach is free. Some cities, and this place is one example, there’s all these clubs and you need membership and, you know, six people to tick your name and all that. Fuck all that, man.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Crowe in Noah. Photograph: Niko Tavernise

But a calmer life or not, the promotional trail for The Water Diviner has not been without incident. There was controversy over Crowe’s appearance on a chatshow in Australia, although it was a little difficult to tell whether people were more upset about his views on the “mythology” of the battle of Gallipoli or the fact that he’d turned up to the interview wearing tracksuit bottoms.

And then there was the stuff he told Australian Women’s Weekly about female actors needing to act their age, complaining about “the woman who at 40, 45, 48, still wants to play the ingenue”, which some people thought was a bit rich given the scene in The Water Diviner when two much younger actors – one of them the former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko – discuss the attractiveness of Crowe’s character. He was, he says, just trying to point out that “the types of roles you play change”.

“It doesn’t matter what age you are, right? But success is not a bar you reach and then, by right, you’re entitled to that for the rest of your career. As you change, as you age, you have to realise it’s still the same struggle as when you didn’t have that success, and if you’re not prepared to continuously look for success, if you think you’re entitled, then you’re in the wrong business. But what I said about knowing 40-year-old women who are absolutely certain that because they eat the right things, they do yoga, look after their bodies … they look sensational, but that still doesn’t mean they look 21. In their eyes, there’s not the ingenue kind of innocence. I can’t be the gladiator any more. I don’t have that kind of physicality.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In Romper Stomper, 1992. Photograph: Medusa Pictures

“Look,” he sighs, “the thing that people are talking about in terms of ageism or sexism or whatever, that’s prevalent everywhere and it’s male and female. When my dad was 45, he was suddenly unemployable. He’d always been the boss, always been in control, but now, in the job he was doing, there was a 25-year-old who could do it for half the money. So that’s life.But the examples I used – Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep – there’s a dozen women, Maggie Smith and whatever …” His voice tails off again. “I’m just saying: be comfortable in your own skin. Sure, you know, if you’re lucky enough you get to be the ingenue, but then at a certain point, you’re the dowager. But enjoy playing that role too.”

It’s at this point that his publicist reappears: Crowe has to go, for a fan Q&A on Twitter. With its trolls and storms and constant air of simmering indignation, Twitter might seem like an odd place to find Crowe, who admits to being easily “sparked up”, even before you factor in that the gossip magazines scour it continuously, ready to pounce on any celebrity indiscretion. But he is never off it, detailing his workout regime, puffing the achievements of the rugby team he owns, idly pondering the fortunes of Leeds United.

“Well, you just block people. Block the motherfuckers. I reckon, on Twitter, the thing they need to work on is giving you more satis faction when you block somebody. When you push ‘Block’, there should be like a nuclear explosion, and that person’s photograph is shattered to a million fucking pieces, so you go: ‘Yeah, see ya mate.’ BOOM. Sooner or later they’ll do that, right. And you’ll know where the idea came from.”

He pauses, looking rather satisified with this idea. “Listen, I don’t go out there to put myself in a situation, ever, where I’m saying: ‘Yeah, throw negativity at me.’ But if people want to do that, it’s up to you the way you respond to it. You can be that person where you duck and weave, or you’re obsequious about it and allow them to be aggressive. But if someone’s being a fucking tool, they’re being a tosser, and they’re actually confronting you, I’d much rather say: ‘Listen, here’s the thing, if we were talking as men on the street, you’d never, ever talk to me like that. You’re taking advantage of the situation we’re in, so fuck you, I will reply to you as if we’re on the street.’ Now, it depends on who you are as a person. Are you honestly going to chalk that up as: ‘Hey, I was being a dick, he fucking pointed out I was being a dick, I got my comeuppance?’ Probably not. You’re going to be this big brave dude who’s like: “I confronted the animal, I tamed the beast.’”

Crowe gives out a little snort, and stubs out another B&H. “Tamed the beast. Fuck off, mate. I’m a fucking actor. I put on makeup for a living. The beast? Give me a fucking break.”