Gladiator star Russell Crowe has opened up about the guilt he felt when he won an Oscar for his role in the hit 2000 movie.

The actor took home the Best Actor Academy Award for his role as Maximus Decimus Meridius in the Ridley Scott movie, which also won the Best Picture.

However, he has admitted that he felt bad for getting all the attention when he believed that Scott deserved awards for the film.

“It’s funny because some days it feels so close, and other days it feels like another lifetime altogether,” he told TODAY, revealing that he re-watched the movie in Rome recently.

“It was a humbling experience, man, because I’m watching it and so much changed in my life. I got so many pats on the back, and, you know, I got some big awards and all that, and obviously that sort of stepped me up to a different level for quite some time.

“But I watched that movie, and it’s a director’s film. It was one of those moments of, ‘Why did I get all the attention when really the Academy Award belongs to Ridley Scott?’”

Meanwhile, Crowe recently spoke about the first script for Gladiator, admitting that it was “so bad”.

“Gladiator was a unique experience because the script that they had was so bad, it was just so bad,” he said. “The producer didn’t know I’d actually already been able to get a copy but the thing he said is ‘I don’t want to send you the document we have, because you won’t respond to it’.”

However, he was convinced in the end by Scott’s vision for the movie, adding: “He was so prepared and the things he was showing me and the visual images and the mathematics of how he was going to not have to build an entire Colosseum yet still shoot the Colosseum. And we just clicked on that first meeting.”