Geoffrey Rush on Pirates, Pinter and pugs: ‘Just be happy we evolved on this bit of rock'

The Rule of Jenny Pen looks terrifying! Does the prospect of sudden ageing frighten you? BenderRodriguez It's not sudden. I was in [King] Lear when I was 64 and said: 'I need a wig that's grey because he's supposed to be 80.' Now I'm 73 and I still think inside I'm a brunette. This is the 54th year of my career. The last decade has just galloped past. I waited for something like this – a project that I latched on to. There's been a lot of stuff that I turned down. I'm now being very pernickety about what I commit three or four months of my life to.
No doubt there was also a lot of work behind it, but was playing Hector Barbossa in the Pirates of the Caribbean films as much fun as it looked? Have you ever reinhabited the character for a brief moment, to amuse yourself or others? Liam01
Yeah, it was fun. [Director] Gore Verbinski had a kind of pop cultural sense of anarchy. Anyone who liked the Pirates films should also check out Rango, which has his cinematic fingerprints all over it. I've reinhabited the character for brief moments, for the Disney ride in Anaheim, and I think Shanghai, and maybe in Florida. I remember having to go and voice some lines after a day on another film, and rolling my eyes going: 'Oh my God, will this never go away?' It's the vanity of being a moment of cinema folklore. It's fun.
Have you had much experience of care homes? BenderRodriguezMy mum died in 2022, quite sweetly on Valentine's Day, which was very moving. She'd been in a care home for about three or four years. The last year there was a noticeable decline. She was in her 90s. My mother-in-law, also. So, yes, once you turn 60, the time is coming up for you to thank your carers.
How did it feel having a Nobel prize winner playing your conscience? (Harold Pinter in The Tailor of Panama.) UrrurrshIt was three of the greatest days of my life. He was a hero to me when I was studying English theatre in the late 60s in Brisbane. And suddenly he was there. They'd done a painting of Harold in a three-piece, blue pencil-stripe suit with a tailor's measure around his neck. He came in, a little sweaty and a little prickly, and he saw that painting and tears just welled in his eyes. He said: 'My father worked in the East End as a tailor, like many Jewish émigrés did. So I find that overwhelmingly powerful.'
Pinter told me that when he got his first royalty cheque for The Homecoming, he went down and said: 'Dad, you're coming home and you don't need to come back here any more.'
You've played a lot of real-life characters including Trotsky and now Groucho Marx. How does your approach to these roles differ from fictional characters? hubbahubba, Haider3, WomanofWolfvilleI have played a number of what people would sniff their noses at and call biopics. And we all know that, for some biopics in commercial Hollywood, you're gonna get the Wikipedia tropes. With Elizabeth, the director Shekhar Kapur – being a man from India – never spoke to me like he was from the RSC. He just spoke about Krishna. He spoke about Elizabeth and Walsingham as being like gods: mythical as well as big political figures. So that's always been a useful way to go. Even playing Einstein [in Genius] or Trotsky [in Frida], you've got to find what's inside that character that has some kind of contemporary relevance you can portray without denying the historical context.
Quills (2000) is a favourite and your performance was superb. What was it like working with Philip Kaufman? BicuserI went into a meeting with Philip to say that I couldn't possibly do the part and that Marlon Brando should do it, because in 1808, the Marquis de Sade was 300lb and I'm not.
I learned a great lesson from that because he said: 'No, the Marquis that Doug has written is the fantasy in the Marquis' head. It's as if he's the hero of the story: a wry, lithe, elegant, muscular god in his own attic.'
I very much enjoyed The Best Offer in which you and Donald Sutherland were both excellent. It should have been a bigger success. Any other films you've done which deserved more than they got? pconlFilms get what they deserve. I would've liked The Warrior's Way, originally called Laundry Warrior – which I thought was a much more kitsch and honest title – to have done better. It was struck down by the big financial crisis in 2008. The fact that the lead character was a baby, too, didn't help. I thought they'd written a fantastic eastern western where what was at stake was the survival of the baby who was the last of the clashing clans. I thought it could have gone gangbusters, but yeah, not so much.
What memories do you have of Toowoomba? Didgebaba
When I was eight, my single mum and my sister and I went to live with my grandparents there. It was kind of artistic wasteland in regional Australia. But it also wasn't.
George Sorlie had created this travelling variety troupe which had been picked up again by his widow and a great clown, Bobby Le Brun. By night, they would do a variety show with jugglers and dancers and songs and speciality acts. And then by day, that whole troupe would do a panto.
These people were deeply rooted in the smell of sawdust, the greasepaint, putting the tent up. There was also the Toowoomba Philharmonic Society, which gave me a lifelong love of Broadway musicals because their production in 1959 of Oklahoma is still deeply edged into my psyche.
Lantana is one of my favourite neo-noirs. Is noir an Aussie genre, or is can-do, sunny optimism more in line with the national psyche? StevefromNottinghamI'm always surprised that's the film the gen Z audience knows me for.
Both pessimism and optimism happen. When I did Shakespeare in Love, the young guys were all staunchly regional and proud of it, no longer the generation who had to crush their regional dialect into PR. They were proudly scousers or northerners. But they could do their stuff. Every afternoon we'd watch Neighbours and they were all really great at what they thought was a fantastic Australian accent. And I said: 'No, that's a television Australian accent. No one exists that actually speaks like that. It's much more nuanced.'
I think that is the sunny can-do image of Australia. There's a cultural reality to the Ten Pound Poms. But Australia also has films like Wake in Fright and Nitram, the film that Justin Kurzel did about the Port Arthur massacre. We come from a country that has a lot of skeletons in the closet, a lot of regrets, a lot of difficulties, from white settlement onwards. The good film-makers don't shy away from that. I think that's why our boisterous, rough-edged sardonic sense of humour can be quite biting and quite satirical. A way of acknowledging that we're just not surf culture.
Was John Lithgow as scary as he looked [in Jenny Pen] and how do you rate his Aussie accent? BenderRodriguezYes! The first conversation we had on a Zoom he said: 'I've got this guy to make some special teeth.' And I went: 'You're my kind of actor.' He's got a De Palma degree in horror acting. And he had silver-grey contacts made and said: 'The moment I put them in, the character was 98% there.'
I did tell him to beware the New Zealand accent. It's a trap for English-speaking people. Kate Winslet is the only person I know who has the kind of dialect chops to do it. Her impression of Jane Campion was forensic in its detail. John and I talked about what one of my voice tutors used to call having an 'idiolect', which is the distinct sound of your voice. And John went for something nasty and dry and deceptive and duplicitous, just in the nature of the character.
What is your favourite Peter Sellers film? After preparing for your great performance as him [in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers], would you agree with his very sad assessment that outside his roles, he had no real sense of his own identity? Bauhaus66I was so lucky. I was in LA doing Pirates and at the end of Sunset Boulevard there were a lot of extraordinary DVD and VHS shops. We found pretty much every Peter Sellers film. So I did watch everything. He was blessed with a kind of extraordinary genius. But with success and fame and drugs and swinging London and everything, you have to confront a lot of stuff. I think that happened to him.
I don't care that Caravaggio murdered people. I don't mind that Ripley murders people, because I thought Andrew Scott made that character so alarmingly true that I sort of hoped he got away with it. A lot of what was going on around him was privileged and he's going: 'Fuck off! You are dead, east coast rich people!'
You've portrayed Lionel Logue (in The King's Speech), Donovan Donaly (Intolerable Cruelty), Hans Hubermann (The Book Thief), Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Twelfth Night), and even voiced Bunyip Bluegum (The Magic Pudding). Is it purely coincidental, or are you secretly drawn to alliterative characters? VerulamiumParkRangerThis made me actually go through my IMDb list, and my theatrical list, to see if they'd missed anything. I avidly read Superman comics as a child and I was obsessed by the LL syndrome: Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lex Luther. I found that kind of phenomenal when I was 10 as I did when I read Ulysses in Shakespeare and Company, where I was fortunate enough to blag a room for six weeks when I first moved to Paris.
I have played a 'Harry' more times than any other character – in The Tailor of Panama, The Banger Sisters, in some short film. I've been 'Harried'. Michael Caine has the same thing. Caine would only ever call Joaquin Phoenix 'Joe-a-quin'; 'You read it, Geoffrey,' he'd say. 'And it's not Rafe Fiennes, it's Ralph.' He was hilarious like that.
Kia ora! What attracts you to roles first – the story or the character? I love your performance in House on Haunted Hill, even though it's hardly Proust. You seem to have a whale of a time, though, and that comes through every scene. WilfyFrederick
I never assumed it was Proust. I liked the fact that it was a William Malone horror piece, avoiding CGI, with all of the old William Castle techniques to create a netherworld and creepy scenarios. I'd been in tights or period costume for so long and I thought: this is the ideal role to do because, as one of the producers – Robert Zemeckis or Joel Silver – said: 'It's low budget. We'll make it for $15m and it will do two bumper weekends for Halloween.' Which it did; it made $40m. So they were like: 'Hey, we just made $25m. Let's move on to the next chapter.' There was something nice about that.
When you get home and are not working, what do you do for entertainment?AwightmateMy obsession apart from Superman and vaudeville is the Mercury Seven [astronauts] and the James Webb telescope. I'm intrigued that it's now however many million miles at a certain point in orbit around the sun, so that it can be at the right temperature. And that they ingeniously had to develop this massive shield which is made up of hexagons. And that was all folded up mathematically, like a chrysalis, like a moth in a cocoon. And it went up into space and then it opened itself and we're now seeing stuff in the dark.
I'm just completely obsessed by the otherness of what's out there. Everyone says one day they'll suddenly go: 'There's been definite communication with beings or creatures or overdeveloped insects that went into a different direction. They're making contact with us.' The magnitude of it all! But that may not even happen. It may have happened millions of years ago and come and gone.
So just be happy that we actually evolved on this bit of rock and became relatively sophisticated. But not that sophisticated, because this is probably the worst time the planet's ever really been through. There's an edge, and in Jenny Pen audiences tap into that. What would it be like to be in that home in the last chapter of your life, to know that there's really no hope?
I also like dogs and cryptic crosswords. I have a greyhound and a regular series of generational pugs. The one we've got at the moment is nearing her end. The look in her eyes is becoming bewildered and lost and I tell her: 'You're a honey.'
The Rule of Jenny Pen is in UK and Irish cinemas now, and on Shudder and AMC+ from 28 March

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