Rich movie stars spend their money exactly how you’d think. Russell Crowe, for instance, dropped $35,000 on a dinosaur head he saw sitting on display in Leonardo DiCaprio’s house.
Just like that.
“I bought it for my kids, and you know, cut myself a little bit of slack here, there was a bunch of vodka involved in the transaction and it happened at Leonardo’s house,” Crowe told Howard Stern Wednesday on his SiriusXM Satellite show.
“So you were drinking at Leonardo’s house, you guys were having a fun night, and you say to Leonardo, ‘Gee, this is fantastic a dinosaur head’?” Stern asked him.
“No, I think he started the conversation, he’s like, ‘I got this one, but there’s another one coming on the market that I really want so I’m trying to sell this one’ and I said, ‘Well, I’ll buy it’ I said ‘How much you want for it?’ He was pretty cool about it, he said, ‘Just give me what I paid for it,’ and I think he paid 30, 35 grand for it,” Crowe explained.
He didn’t remember what kind of dinosaur it was, but in 2018 he sold it through Sotheby’s Australia in an auction designed to pay for his divorce.
The mounted skull is of a Mosasaur that the auction house described as “the fossil relative of the monitor lizard family, which includes the Komodo Drago, the Mosasaur was a giant, serpentine marine reptile, which was prevalent during the Late Cretaceous Period, approximately 65 million years ago. Mosasaurs were formidable hunters, with a double-hinged jaw and a flexible skull enabling them to eat their prey whole.”
“I think it’s almost doubled in value since I sold it,” Crowe told Stern, who said he thought a giant dinosaur head would be worth much more.
Russell Crowe once drunkenly bought a dinosaur head from Leonardo DiCaprio https://t.co/DCTrr53TsM
— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) June 20, 2019
“It was not a very popular dinosaur,” Crowe quipped, explaining that he was really thinking of his kids even if he was smashed when he purchased the fossil.
“Part of the reason for buying it, is that when I did buy it around 2008, 2009, my kids, particularly my oldest were fascinated, into dinosaurs, so I said, ‘Here you go, here’s one for the playroom,'” Crowe recalled.
The actor was on the show to promote his new Showtime series, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” in which he plays former Fox News boss Roger Ailes.
Stern called his performance in the show “mind-blowing.”
