Getting drunk and then buying a dinosaur head from Leonardo DiCaprio is a strange thing to admit to, but that’s what Russell Crowe did during a stop on The Howard Stern Show this week.
“I bought it for my kids and, cut myself a little bit of slack, there was a bunch of vodka involved in that transaction,” Crowe, 55, told Stern, adding that the drinking happened at DiCaprio’s house, where he offered to spend $35,000 on it.
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“I think [DiCaprio] started the conversation,” the Gladiator star explained. “He was like, ‘I’ve got this one but there’s another one coming onto the market that I want so I’m trying to sell that one.’ I said, ‘I’ll buy it.’”
Crowe continued, “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 said the incident took place back in 2008 or 2009, when his children were really into dinosaurs. “So I said, ‘Here’s one for the playroom!’” Crowe recalled.
Unfortunately, Crowe no longer has the skull. He auctioned it off for $65,000 during his infamous 2018 auction The Art of Divorce, after his split from Danielle Spencer. Crowe auctioned off 200 personal items he acquired during their nine-year marriage, reports PEOPLE.
Crowe told Stern he was not sure what kind of dinosaur it was, but the auction site lists it as a Mosasaur skull. The dinosaur was common during the Late Cretaceous Period, or 65 million years ago.
“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,” the Sotheby’s Australia site reads. “Mosasaurs were formidable hunters, with a double-hinged jaw and a flexible skull enabling them to eat their prey whole.”
One of the other items sold during the sale was a Cinderella Man jockstrap that John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight team bought and donated to one of the last Blockbusters in Alaska. Crowe later returned the favor by donating to the Australia Zoo’s koala chlamydia ward, which was named for Oliver. The storyline came to a climax in November 2018, when Crowe and Armie Hammer appeared in an elaborate heist video to get the jockstrap back.
Crowe and Spencer were married from 2003 to 2018 and first met while making 1990’s The Crossing. The couple, who share sons Charles, 15, and Tennyson, 13, announced their split in 2012.
Crowe will next be seen as Roger Ailes in Showtime’s The Loudest Voice, which debuts on Sunday, June 30 at 9 p.m. ET.
Photo credit: Jemal Countess/WireImage/Getty Images
