Geoffrey Rush: A Plank without Peer

Geoffrey Rush has made his mantelpiece come to life with portrayals of real people who were real characters. For imitating the seemingly inimitable Peter Sellers (The Life and Times of Peter Sellers), Geoffrey Rush garnered a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy; for his portrayal of the Marquis de Sade in Quills, he picked up an Oscar nomination and numerous accolades; a BAFTA arrived for Elizabeth; one of his three SAG Awards settled on his slate for Shakespeare in Love; he earned an Oscar, Golden Globe, BAFTA and a clean sweep of the film critics' awards for his effort as the playful pianist, David Helfgott, in Shine; and has now earned perennial popcorn popularity alongside the most playful of pirates in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Captain Jack Sparrow.

With well-worn boards beneath his stage and sea legs, and crappy prosthetic teeth to accompany his voyage into what might, in May, become the most successful franchise in box-office history, this actor's self-navigated saunter to a screen career has certainly not slowed his cinematic rise.

And while Captain Barbossa is at home on a bow, Rush's 2007 sees him poised to reprise his period work in The Golden Age (a sequel to Shekhar Kapur's Blanchett-starring Elizabeth), as well as taking the curtain call in a Melbourne, Australia, theatrical production of Eugene Ionesco's Exit the King (which Rush adapted with long-time associate Neil Armfield).

Geoffrey Rush from the movie "Shine"

Moving Pictures Magazine:   What was the attraction of adapting Ionesco?
Geoffrey Rush: Exit the King is one of those plays that seems to be a completely forgotten gem, and it's suddenly come into very sharp focus again. I think it's a great black comedic farce of what happens when the old world is f-cked, basically. It's about a country being in a state of crisis - everything being in a state of crisis. It's outrageously funny, but I think if you said to people, "What do you feel about the state of the world?" I think everyone kind of says, "Well, it seems broken."

Even in the popular [mainstream] arena, if you look at a lot of the films this year - The Queen, The Last King of Scotland, The Good Shepherd, The Good German - there's a lot of stuff out there about failed leadership or, you know, the problems of leadership, or the history of the organizations that are presumably in charge of national protection; you know. Everyone's keen to look into the machinery of that.

MPM:  Where do you weigh in on the debate about actors' responsibilities to utilize their visibility to speak out on societal or political issues?
Rush:    You know, I think the great pieces, the great plays and the more interesting films, they touch on [those issues] anyway.

MPM:  Do you think that these films can affect society, or do you think it's just a reflection of where society is?
Rush:   Well, it's a two-way street really. Legislation affects things. I think films impact in a different way. What we now call "popular culture"... it's such a labyrinth of influences. The kind of resources that are available now, and the ways and places people access information now, is at a disturbing level. It's impossible to absorb from a picture. Maybe film's final role now is to give some kind of reflective space where you can actually filter through the fundamental themes that might be coming out of all this white noise.

MPM:  In Pirates and Peter Sellers, you've got the costumes and prosthetics to aid the creation of characters. In Quills, there was a comically complete absence of anything behind which to hide. Do you prefer one way of working?
Rush:   I always look at the character in terms of some kind of silhouette or outline, even though the majority of film is a close-up medium. I always look for the clues as to when the wide shots will reveal what that character looks like, head to toe, in the landscape. There are dozens and dozens of decisions being made according to the script or moment of rehearsal or flashes of inspiration or wild notions.

When [Johnny Depp and I] first got together on the first film, he arrived with his teeth all capped gold and silver. I think everyone thought Disney was certainly expecting him to be - you know, the romantic lead or something; you know, the most accessible, conventional, Errol Flynn type guy. I just went, "Well, that seems like a really interesting angle for him to take," because this Jack Sparrow is a character, you know, it's not like he's a marketing product or something. But I was pretty certain - because I was the renegade, the boss - that Jack Sparrow might be a sort of urban hip-hop Goth, and that I'd still be getting around like a hangover from the ‘60s.

And given that the story is now seven and a half hours long, the history goes very global - into the corporate forces of the East India Trading Company, who were basically trying to smash out the vagabond romance of individual piracy and trying to corporatize the life overseas.

MPM: Shine was almost 10 years ago. Where do you think the Australian film industry stands now?
Rush: When everyone talks about it in the [Australian] media, the industry is always "dying" or "on the brink of recovery"; it's a three-month cycle. I never thought about being an Australian film actor for all the time that I was working in theater in the '70s. The kind of things they were making didn't seem to be what I was attracted to.

But in the last 10 or 12 years, I've had a very substantial connection with the industry. And when I went to the AFIs [Australian Film Industry awards] late last year, it was a very exciting time. It was the first time in ages that you felt there were more than enough great films that could contest for best picture, and that you knew someone was going to be missing out on a nomination.

MPM:  Cate's rise within the industry has paralleled the timing of yours. Have you kept in touch since the first Elizabeth?
Rush:   No. It's not as though we fell out of favor, but as pals we're quite haphazard and feckless. But you e-mail, you know. We had a notable meeting and we got together in L.A. maybe two and a half years ago, when the idea of Golden Age was being pushed, and I took advantage of that time to say to Shekhar [Kapur], "Let's get together with Cate so we can really convince her," because she was hesitant at that stage; she didn't want to do what she seemed to think was repeating a role.

MPM:  Can you identify a mentor in your career?
Rush:   I like to say I'm some kind of bastard offspring of those who have Australian stage heritage, like [Sir] Robert Helpmann or Leo McKern or Coral Browne. I'd like to think that I'd rather fallen out of the branches of that family tree because, when I was doing theater all through the '70s and '80s - and the Australian film industry was really rocking at that point - it felt as though the kind of male persona they wanted in the movies then was very much a sort of pioneering, rugged kind of type...

MPM:  The bronzed Aussie.
Rush:   Yeah.

While perhaps not bronzed enough for Australian film of that era, Rush has certainly navigated his way through gifted characters to a hard-earned - and well-rewarded - golden age.

Talk about a wild ride.