Russell Crowe is talking about the scene that eventually broke him and sent him to his knees, shivering.

Crowe’s wife, Danielle Spencer, had told him she wanted to dissolve their nine-year marriage only weeks before the traumatic day of filming.

Crowe noticed he couldn’t stop shivering after a particularly strenuous day while filming sequences off the coast of Iceland. “We were doing a scene in Iceland where I had to fall into the sea,” he tells Event magazine. “I’d been in and out of the sea, half-naked, filming all day… physically it was very demanding. There were these rain towers in the sky that could flood eight football fields in 30 seconds, and it was constant rain. We had 36 days of it.”

‘It gets to the point where it’s like Chinese water torture. You can’t take it any more.

‘I went into hypothermia. When we wrapped, I was lying on these stones and I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t stop shaking. I couldn’t stop crying.

‘Seven or eight people put blankets on me and sat on me until I stopped. It was crazy – they were hugging me, trying to get me to stop shaking.’

Crowe claims that the crew covered him with blankets and even sat on top of him until he stopped trembling.

“It was crazy – they were hugging me, trying to stop me shaking. This happened just a few weeks after Danielle had told me she didn’t want to be married any more and insisted that we sit in front of our children and tell them. So it was pretty heavy.”

Of course, because we’re talking about Russell Crowe — the big actor famed for his manly-man performances — this was all over in a flash. “Well, suddenly I stopped crying and shaking,” he says. “I pushed them all off and walked back to my trailer. They were like, ‘Do you want anything?’ and I was like, ‘F**k off! It’s done. Give me a glass of wine.’”

Noah’s trailer has been panned by both fundamentalist Christian organizations in the United States and conservative Muslim countries. Christians object to Noah seeming intoxicated and the account not being a literal translation of the Bible, while Muslims object to the representation of prophets breaking Islamic rules.

After word leaked in late 2012 that Spencer had left him, Crowe’s private life became tabloid fodder.

Charlie and Tennyson have been the couple’s two sons. They had been married for nine years and had two sons together. Crowe and Spencer have never formally announced their split.