Russell Crowe talks about his new film 'The Next Three Days'

It’s a strange, slightly off-putting experience talking directly to Russell Crowe. Never mind the tired old stories about him not getting along with the press or of throwing telephones at people. There’s something going on in his dark eyes. They look both weary and wise, and there might be something roiling up behind them. It’s just hard to know whether he’s in a good mood or a bad one.

Thankfully he was in mellow mode to talk about “The Next Three Days,” in which he plays a mild-mannered college professor whose comfortable world is torn apart when his wife (Elizabeth Banks) is accused of murder and locked up in prison, leaving him to care for their young son. And leading him to figure out, against all odds, how to bust her out. The film opens Friday.

The big question is whether audiences will buy the fact that this milquetoast of a guy has the guts to stand up and go through with such a daring act.

“I think it’s about belief,” said Russell, his Australian accent making him just a bit friendlier. “If the audience is seeing that this guy believes in what he’s doing then they flow with him. They might not agree with what he’s doing but he’s obviously got an unshakeable belief in his wife. When he hits some hurdles and things don’t work out properly, the mere fact that he keeps going – that’s the transformation, if there is one. It’s in his persistence.”

Though people tend to remember his rough and tumble parts in “Gladiator,” “L.A. Confidential,” and “American Gangster,” Crowe has done a number of roles that feature him as a thoughtful, if not exactly regular, guy. Think “A Beautiful Mind” or “A Good Year.” But in “The Next Three Days,” his John Brennan is someone who simply loves his wife and will do anything he can to help her. He found some inspiration for the character by looking homeward.

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“On the tenth of November my parents celebrated their 49th wedding anniversary,” he said. “So I’ve been very lucky and blessed in that way. I’ve grown up in a household which is all about commitment through the hard times and the good. I was away from my own family for 87 days in order to make this film. There was a big distance between us, and that made a lot of the things that we were doing in the script come into a very stark reality. So a lot of the time, I take the inspiration that I need for what I’m doing from the thing that I’m doing.”

Although he didn’t enjoy anything about the scenes that were filmed in an actual prison (“There’s a real tyranny in the finality of those doors when they close.”), he knew he was in good hands being directed by Paul Haggis (“Crash”), who also co-wrote the script.

“It’s a real bonus when the writer is the director because if something becomes apparent to you that hasn’t been covered or if there’s a question, then because he’s actually constructed it you tend to get a conversation on that particular thing going a lot quicker,” he said. “But I was a big fan of ‘Crash,’ so when this script was sent to me that was one of the reasons that I read it as quickly as I did.

Neither did it hurt that Crowe, who spends much of the film alone, thinking things through rather than speaking, had some good company in the brief appearances of other actors.

“It was a real sense of enjoyment for me that those actors were coming in because a lot of this film is just me in a room filing down a key,” he said. “So, once a week, basically, I had Liam Neeson coming in and then Daniel Stern coming in and then Brian Dennehy coming in. It was great to have them to anticipate and look forward to.”

Yet it was working with 8-year-old Ty Simpkins, playing his son Luke, that gave him even greater pleasure because, again, it made him think about being back home in Australia.

“He’s a really good little actor,” said Crowe, “and as I was talking about before there was a large geographical distance between me and my own kids. So that played a real part in the atmosphere that was around me at the time of making the film.”

It turns out that when Crowe is between films – and not singing and playing guitar in his band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts – he’s a real homebody.

“I’m in that sort of schedule at the moment that a lot of parents find themselves in,” he said. “I take my boys to school in the morning and then there’s a couple of hours in the middle of the day and then I’ve got to be ready to go and pick them up and then you go through the bath time and the dinnertime and the bedtime story. So after eight o’clock there’s really not enough time in the day to engage yourself in anything creative. But funnily enough, having said that, I have a very busy life in Australia. I’ve managed to involve myself in lots of different things, football teams and what have you.”