Sid is the fiendish serial killer he plays in "Virtuosity", a futuristic thriller starring Denzel Washington, and Kelly Lynch. The 183 Prophets of Doom are Crowe's source marterial, the gruesome gallery who furnish the "extra bits" that help craft cinema's first virtual villian.

"I tell you, mate, he's an evil b*****d," says Crowe, with evident relish. "He decides that humans want to kill themselves. That's fine with him. He'll help them out. He's interactive. He'll give you what you want."

It's a warm, summer night in downtown Los Angeles, and we're sitting in Crowe's trailer as the shadows lengthen across a desolate cityscape of abandoned buildings, railroad tracks and empty streets - classic Hollywood psycho-killer turf. Crowe is in full costume. Since our last meeting, a bushwalk through the Hollywood Hills a couple of days before, he has undergone a dramatic metamorphosis. I am used to his affable easy-going manner and habitual street grunge: denims, T-shirts, tousled hair and actor's stubble. Now he is in full cyber-outlaw mode: a smooth face caked in make-up, a severely sculpted hair-cut - "think Jack Lord Hawaii Five-O - and a $4,000 suit riddled with fake bullet holes encrusted with nanogoo, the blue shampoo-like ooze that passes for virtual gore. His 82kg [82kg = 180.77777 pounds] frame seems taller and slightly threatening.

Of course, menace is the key to Crowe's characrter. Created as a virtual-reality criminal to test police skills, Sid 6.7 is a computer-generated Hannibal Lector with 183 different personalities, mostly murderers, with a dash of culture - Laurence Olivier, Herbert von Karajan - thrown in to add seductive charm. Nobody has ever beaten him. Naturally, Sid escapes into the real world, wreaking havoc throughout 1999 Los Angeles, and setting up what promises to be the season's penultimate chase movie. "Sid understands human fallibility," Crowe explains. "He thinks, 'If I'm going to kill people, I'm going to do it my way. I'm going to be original."

Washington plays Parker Barnes, a rogue cop with a dreadful secret, who's hot on Sid's trail. Lynch is Madison Carter, an expert who provides back-up. A cautionary story about a man-made monster on the prowl, "Virtuosity" is the cyber era's Frankenstein. It's a movie about violence coming out of the machine," says Brett Leonard, Virtuosity's director, "and biting us on the ass." A burly, pony-tailed figure in black, Leonard sees Sid as a media slut, horrific proof of Andy Warhol's dictum that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. "It's a very scary film. Sid is a very evil character. But he's synthetic. He's a mirror. He's us." Like everyone else I spoke to in Hollywood, Leonard has been galvanised by Crowe's mesmerising performance as Hando, the terrifying neo-Nazi skinhead in "Romper Stomper". He spent seven months convincing Paramount Pictures that the 31-year-old New Zealander, unknown to US audiences, had what it took to play a pivotal role in a major Hollywood picture. In short, that Crowe was Sid.

"I could tell he wanted to have fun with this role," laughs Leonard, as Crowe fiddles with his laptop. "He saw a way of liking this guy! That isn't easy, because Sid's a very bad man. This is a very dark film, yet the audience has to love Side for it to work. Otherwise it would be too oppressive," he explains. "Russell's ability to remain menacing, while at the same time being funny and charming, is a very rare amalgam. Very few screen actors have true menace. Russell has."

Later that night as we stand under the arc lights, high on the curve of a bridge closed by LAPD barriers, Crowe, leaking nanogoo, gives us a taste of that menace. The film wrapped in May, but Leonard wants some new footage to push one of "Virtuosity's" finely calibrated climaxes just that little bit closer to the edge. It's a small scene, probably less than a minute of screen time. With Barnes in hot pursuit, Sid has precipitated a mega car crash across a bridge. As his pursuer closes in, Sid stands defiantly atop a totalled police cruiser, pistol in hand.

It is Crowe's moment. As we watch, he runs across the bridge, momentarily pausing at the parapet to contemplate the abyss. (Later that night his stunt-double leaps over the edge.) The camera zooms in and Sid's leering face floods the monitors. Laughing demonically, he loooks back at Barnes and gives his nemesis a parting compliment: "God! This guy's fun!" It's a wrap. As the crew prepares for the next shot, Crowe wonders back to the monitors while Leonard reruns the scene. The actor watches intently as Sid looms into view. "Okay," he says half to himself, "Cool."

Life in Hollywood wasn't always cool. Back in November 1993, on the eve of his American debut, Crowe was suddenly faced with the prospect of total wipe-out. En route from Sydney, where he had just finished playing Jack Thompson's gay son in The Sum of Us, to work with Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Quick and the Dead, he discovered that most of his lines had been dumped from the script. It was a sobering moment.

"I was scared." Crowe says quietly in his small West Holywood hotel suite, strewn with scripts and CD's. Because that changed my influence level dramatically. If your dialogue's taken out, you've got no ammunition. You've got no status." The Quick and the Dead in which Crowe was cast as Cort, a gunfighter-turned -priest, was a crucial film, his chance to prove he could cut it in Hollywood. "I was a young lad doing my first movie in America," he recalls. "I couldn't burst in and say, 'Where's my f****n' role?'" He chortles at the prospect.

Lighting a cigarette, he continues. "Instead I've gotta say, 'Okay. That's where it is. Cool.' The decisions I made was, 'All right. This guy's is going to be the best gunfighter. Absolutely, 100 per cent real.'" And so he was. In a movie which forces him to remain silent while being kicked, beaten and generally dumped on by various desperados, until he gets the drop in the final reel, Crowe's charisma and skill repeatedly seduce the camera. In short, he steals the picture.

"He crafted a great performance, even though he didn't have the lines," recalls director Sam Raimi. "Sometimes he could do it with a gesture, even a subtle raising of the lip. He knew the exact moment to deliver the beat ... But he is a tough bastard to get along with." he laughs. "The problem in working with Russell is that he always has a good idea. And he has no tact! He tells you! Sometimes he stood the whole scene on its head. It's not easy by a long chalk to work with Russell. But it's exciting and it pays off dramatically."

Since his 1990 screen debut in "Blood Oath", he has made 15 movies, and, if the cards fall his way, is poised to be the biggest Antipodean star since Mel Gibson and Nicole Kidman crashed Hollywood's A-list. If "Proof", Crowe's 1991 breakthrough hit in which he played a gullible dishwashwer, alerted Tinseltown to the young New Zealander's potential, "Romper Stomper" sparked an agency firestorm and helped him secure a deal with International Creative Management in the following year. "I remember showing some scenes to Ed Larmardo and George Freeman over at ICM," Crowe laughs. "Ed was almost physically ill. He got up after the first scene" - Crowe is pitching across the hotel room in vivid pantomime - "and said, 'Well, I won't be watching that movie. You're very good at your job.' And he walked out." Needless to say, ICM snapped him up.

Since finishing "The Sum of Us" Crowe has based himself in LA, making four movies back to back. Besides "Virtuosity" and "The Quick and the Dead" he has appeared in "No Way Back", a low budget independent film, as "a bearded New York FBI agent with a chip on his shoulder"; and"Rough Magic", a "New Age romance" filmed in Central America in which he plays an off-beat journalist who falls in love with Bridget Fonda. So far, neither film has surfaced. Crowe, who had his sights set on the role of Sid 6.7, seems to have treated both films as a learning experience, cruising the cinematic waterfront to see how the US movie industry works.

It is a strategy which is slowly paying off. Although largely unknown to American audiences, his name and busy schedule have generated an expectant buzz within the movie world. It helped of course, when the New York Times mentioned that Crowe had "the animal magnetism of the young Marlon Brando". Potent comparisons like that have pumped up the volume. If Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp or Val Kilmer - three heart-throbs who read the same scripts that pour into Crowe's hotel room - are white-hot, Crowe is smouldering in the wings, waiting for his chance to ignite the screen.

Crowe is that rare animal in Hollywood: a fearless actor who works from the head as well as the heart, who can play good and bad guys with conviction. "He has the kind of acting prowess you rarely see," says George Freeman, his agent at ICM, who ranks Crowe alongside Daniel Day Lewis, Ralph Fiennes and Sean Penn; that is, stars who are also great actors. Which means he looks good, can tackle widely different roles and, crucially, take risks. Crowe has confidence in spades. Not many Americans with box office potential would feel comfortable playing a neo-Nazi, a deadbeat dishwasher or a gay plumber.

"Too many actors have a movie-star mentality," continues Freeman. "All they want to do is play the love god or the action hero. Russell wants to do just about anything. And he can."

Crowe's search for the truth has taken him down some bumpy paths. He has wanted to be a performer since childhood. At first, most of his energy went into music, as he paid his dues with Kiwi rock bands. By 1987, dressed in black leather, he was busking is Sydney's Kings Cross. "My mate had a Telecaster," he explains. "We used to do a full-on rock 'n roll show. Rockabilly classics. Any Chuck Berry riff. It was a major learning curve. I learned what performance was all about." Earlier this year, he flew in his old band mates, gave them some cash to buy equipment, and set up a digital recording studio in a Hollywood apartment.

There's no denying Crowe has keept his down-to-earth attitude. The morning after our first meeting, he was up at dawn, sitting with fans in front of a television in a Sunset Boulevard bar, watching New Zealand go down to South Africa at the World Rugby Cup Final. "It's important for me to touch base," he says. "As long as I see my family and friends, I know who I am, so it doesn't matter who I take on as an actor. I have that reference point."

The day before the "Virtuosity" re-shoot, he calls me to thrash through the problems inherent in making-it-big-in-Hollywood. In essence, it boils down to this: no matter how tiresome the Hollywood hustle, never let go of the big picture; be true to your talent. It is a mantra Crowe tries to remember as he says "maybe" rather than "no" to people who ask him to play yet another villian. After all, the producers who send you a dumbo script today, might dispatch a real humdinger tomorrow. "I could just take the offers," he muses, "and drift off into oblivion. Do the work that's easy, for a set amount of money. I'd be working right now if that was where my head was." Instead, he craves a juicy role, something he can get his teeth into. As such, "Virtuosity" was the pefect gig for Crowe. "I had the director's enthusiasm (and) we had a good cast.

At the end of the day, Russell Crowe is passionate about his work. "You have to try and get the best out of every situation," he explains, before delivering his credo as an actor. "Every day is new. Every scene is new. Every line of dialogue has a million possibilities. So why not be open and see what comes out?"