It's not clear if they see eye-to-eye on circumcision, but they sure do like each other. This morning, Politico explores the under-reported kinship between Texas governor Rick Perry and hard-partying Gladiator icon Russell Crowe. The Australian actor won't be much help to Perry's presidential campaign (his foreigner status means he can't vote or contribute to campaigns) but his brawling ways would probably make him a liability anyway. But more to the point, these two have a serious "bromance," as Ken Vogel puts it:
He told the Houston Chronicle in 2003,“I don’t think being a celebrity gives you any right whatsoever to air your political views.” In that same interview, however, Crowe said, “I like [Perry] very much as a bloke.” Though he’s known primarily as an actor (he won an Oscar for his role in the 2000 action flick “Gladiator”), Crowe explained that he and his Aussie roots-rock band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, got “a great deal of help in getting the visas we needed” to record an album in Austin in the late 1990s from Perry, then the lieutenant governor of Texas.
It turns out that they go back even further. Perry was serving as agriculture commissioner in the ’90s when he first met Crowe, whose brother had approached the state about an agriculture project.
When Crowe was recording his album in Austin, a time when the "friendship truly blossomed," he bragged to the Chronicle about his close ties to the governor, saying he could "walk into a number of bars … and say, ‘G’day’ to the barman, then ride my motorbike up to the governor’s mansion and get let in.” Other moments of Crowe-Perry backscratching include Crowe being named an honorary Texan in 2000 and Perry being invited to Crowe's exclusive wedding in Australia in 2003. Officially, Perry's people describe the relationship like this. "The governor met Crowe, who has a ranch in Australia, and they talked about farming and ranching, and they developed a friendship that has continued over the years,” a Perry spokeswoman said in 2003.
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