Russell Crowe had to invite 30 people to an "intimate dinner" with Ryan Gosling because all his wife’s friends wanted to meet him.
The 52-year-old actor – who has sons Charles, 12, and Tennyson, nine, with estranged spouse Danielle Spencer – wanted to get to know his ‘The Nice Guys’ co-star before they started filming so invited him and his partner Eva Mendes to enjoy a meal with himself and the singer-and-actress.
However, on the day they were due to meet, Russell discovered Danielle – who he split from in 2012 – had invited all her friends to join them and meet the hunky actor, so he frantically did what he could to "rebalance" the evening and make it less awkward for the 35-year-old star.
He recalled: "I told the wife we were having dinner with Ryan Gosling, she was like ‘Cool’ and didn’t say much but on the day I was talking to her and she’d invited 12 of her girlfriends.
"I’d told Ryan it was an intimate dinner, but now you’ve got my wife and 12 of her girlfriends, and her mother, I was like ‘No you can’t do that’ so I thought, ‘I can’t have him walk in the room with his girlfriend and there’s like 16 women’ so I rebalanced it.
"I started calling blokes. I called RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan. I called Eli Roth, I called all his friends and got them all together. So Ryan walks into the room expecting this intimate dinner party and there’s 30 people."
And Russell didn’t get chance to explain to Ryan – who has daughters Esmeralda, 19 months, and Amada, who was born last month, with Eva – why their intimate evening had escalated until much later.
He added to talk show host Ellen DeGeneres: "So Ryan walked in the room expecting this dinner party and there was 30 people – and I didn’t get to explain why until a couple of years later. "I said, ‘Look mate you got to get along with the wife.’ "
‘The Nice Guys’ sees Ryan’s private eye character team up with Russell’s hired enforcer to investigate a girl’s disappearance.
Russell Crowe’s awkward dinner with Ryan Gosling
