Geoffrey Rush

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

For many actors, their desire to act stretches beyond doing merely film. For Geoffrey Rush, his beginnings are in the world of classical theater, acting with the Queensland Theater Company in Australia.

Starting out acting in films sparingly, the movie world soon realized the depths of Rush's talents on screen. That came when he played piano prodigy David Helfgott in the film Shine, which won him a Best Actor Oscar in 1996, the first Australian actor to do so.

Geoffrey's success led him to do roles in a diverse array of films from Shakespeare In Love and Les Miserables to House On Haunted Hill and the Pirates Of Carribean series. He now returns once again as Elizabeth's advisor Francis Walsingham in the new sequel Elizabeth: The Golden Age, which he stars with alongside Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett and Clive Owen.

When word first was brought up regarding an Elizabeth, Rush tells of the lengthy process during the preliminary stages that came about in deciding whether or not to do the sequel.

'There's a number of elements and there's a certain mythology to that story now,' Geoffrey recalls, '[Director] Shekhar [Kapur], Cate, and I had a fleeting opportunity three or four years ago where we all happened to be in Los Angeles for the one evening and through all the various coordinators and publicists and minders, we said let's set aside a couple of hours and really talk an idea through.'

He notes of how co-star Blanchett was the most unsure of whether or not to play the role of the legendary Queen Elizabeth I again, a role which got her a Best Actress Oscar nomination in 1998 and put her on the map.

'I think from Cate's point of view, she felt, this is a role I've already played,' Rush claims, 'And as you can see from her repertoire since she first blazed onto the scene ten years ago, she's an exploratory, risk-taking, and very kind of unpredictable chooser of repertoire. And maybe she felt that going over reinventing the same character was not going to be a great challenge.'

But Rush says that it was his own personal encouragement that ultimately convinced Blanchett to go back to the role.

'Because I worked with Cate in the theater back in the early 1990's and knew her very much as a colleague and a friend, I just leant on her and said, you know, even in the theatrical repertoire, as you get older, the roles become less,' he says, 'If you're into Shakespeare, you got Queen Margaret to look forward to or maybe a Cleopatra and etc. I said, even in terms of film, it's probably going to be even less opportune. And a great multi-dimensional character like this needs an actress of your caliber.'

He also adds that his motivation was ultimately his personal admiration of her skill as an actress, which has netted her two Best Actress Oscar nominations and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar win for her role as Katherine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator.

'I wanted to be there on the sidelines watching her rev up those Rolls Royce engines, because I'm very into the notion of virtuosic performance in people,' Rush says, 'I think it should always be an aspiring level where you can thrill an audience with an attitude and imagination and Cate is very much that kind of actress.'

Despite him returning to a role he had played once before, Rush notes of how the role of Walsingham in Elizabeth's life has changed in the new sequel.

'Shekhar said two years before we started filming, when the idea of the project was looming, because there were quite two different chapters in each of these films, quite different historical timeframes,' Geoffrey explains, 'Your role, obviously, in the first film was that you were mentoring this young woman coming to a position of power and that she was deeply reliant on your philosophical and resourcefulness. And he said, 'I think the most interesting thing to explore is that now that she has reached that well-seasoned level of power, is to eat away inside of him some surprising sense of self-doubt, as to what his methodology might have been.''

He also notes how the Elizabeth sequel is a testament to Elizabeth I's larger-than-life presence and impact on British history and culture.

'I think Elizabeth: The Golden Age as a script, more so than the first film, gives the actors playing that role those kind of challenges to meet,' Rush believes, 'I mean, we're still looking at what happens when countries go to war over religious conflict at a very specific point in history and what happens in that internal life, when a woman ages being in a very unique position of power.'

'I think it's hard for us now to get around the idea of the divine concept of the queen or the ruler was anointed by God and that they are sort of a much more spiritually, stately kind of figure than the pragmatism of modern politics,' he adds, 'We have to look maybe to the Dalai Lama in our age to get a state of that in some ways, certainly not the people that they pick'in Austria.'

This is not the first time Rush has participated in a film with a sequel. As mentioned before, he's best known for his role as Captain Hector Barbarossa in the highly successful Pirates Of The Carribean movies. In the midst of asking about his feeling on working on sequels, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to also ask Rush whether or not he plans to do another sequel to POTC.

'It all depends on script, ideas, and I would say that Disney executives and all the of the people in Jerry [Bruckheimer's] firm,' he replies, 'I can't imagine, with the kind of box office receipts they've had, saying, 'That was a very aesthetically pleasing scenario. Let's move on to something else.' Possibly.'

However, he claims he'd be more interested in doing another sequel for Elizabeth if the offer was on the table.

'I'd rather see number three on Elizabeth because it is a mighty story,' Rush says, 'I mean it's now all beyond history, it's almost mythical, it's almost legendary. I think out of the British monarchy, you look at Elizabeth I and Victoria and George III and the current queen. I think George III was on the throne for 60 years. That's like having a leader in America since the end of the second World War running the country. So I think there are huge dimensions in those legends and in those myths.'

'And I know Shekhar, being the kind of thinker and provocateur he is, he might imagine almost a one-woman film because Elizabeth apparently absolutely refused to die, she stayed standing in her early 70's, I think it was,' he continues, 'And I think Shekhar is very intrigued by having achieved immortality on Earth, what happens when you meet that deadline. I would love it as an audience member, though that I am hinting that I come back as a ghost. Sure, why not' Hamlet's father comes back and it's one of the great scenes, you know.'

From his body of work, Rush is obviously an actor who is in firm control of the roles he chooses to play. However, he says that the enjoyment of working on Pirates Of The Carribean has enabled him to embrace the more personal benefits that come with working on a franchise.

'With Pirates, we were together from September 2002 to when we finished the press junket in June of this year,' Rush explains, 'We've been living and working together for five years and that generates a different kind of interaction, heads of department, Marine people, stunt guys.'

'I think the same is true of Elizabeth, having worked on that over a 10 year span,' he adds, 'You get a little taste of being a 'band of fellows', I think that's how Tom Stoppard described it in Shakespeare In Love.'

Finally, we asked the 56-year old actor if there was anything next for him on the horizon and the response he gave us was the strangely insightful and brilliant musings typical of a highly skilled, classically-trained actor of his caliber.

'Not particularly, no, not even theatrically,' Rush replies, 'I mean, if I didn't have to ride a horse, because that's the horse, I just don't do equine. I just love the story and I love, again, on this level of legend and mythology and the fantastical storytelling dimensions of it, I love the Don Quixote story. I think that still speaks volumes about that gulf between aspiration and delusion of, the great Chuck Jones quote, to me, certainly defined 20th century thinking, Bugs being who we would like to be and Daffy being who we really are.'