Australian movie star Russell Crowe has been spotted in Malta with a production crew linked to a film the actor is filming locally in the coming days.

Industry sources said Crowe is likely to spend a week in Malta with the team filming Prizefighter, a biopic about 19th-century pugilist Jem Belcher. 

Crowe had starred in the Ridley Scott-directed Roman epic Gladiator, the production of which spent 19 weeks in Malta in 1999, with Fort Ricasoli acting as a stand-in for ancient Rome. He went on to win the Best Actor Award in the Academy Awards.

IMDB lists Matt Hookings and Ray Winstone in Prizefighter's principal cast. Crowe was not previously known to be associated with the film and is not listed in its cast. 

Crowe’s trip to the Mediterranean has been on the books for some time, with the actor taking to Twitter at the end of last month to ask whether any of his 2.7 million followers were from Malta. On Thursday, he tweeted a picture of Filfla captioned “Where am I now?”

Crowe’s film Gladiator remains mythic in Maltese popular culture, largely through its association with the death of English actor Oliver Reed, who suffered a heart attack in Malta while on break from shooting the film.

According to oral accounts of the incident, Reed drank eight pints of lager, a dozen shots of rum, half a bottle of whiskey and a few shots of cognac the night he died, running up a tab of 270 Maltese Liri (€629) during a drinking match at a Valletta pub.