This is a very nice interview, featured in the June 2011 issue of Empire magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

In Conversation with Geoffrey Rush



Interview/words by: Simon Braund
Photo by: Andrew Macpherson

Few actors have burst into the international scene with the force of Geoffrey Rush in 1996′s Shine. His tour-de-force performance as David Helfgott, a piano prodigy whose life was derailed by mental illness and who found salvation in music, is one of the most extraordinary in recent memory and earned Rush critical acclaim and a shower of awards, including a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild award and the Oscar for Best Actor.

The impact of Shine and Rush’s arrival on the world’s stage disguised the fact that he had been a working actor for over a quarter of a century, mostly in his native Australia, with a number of screen and TV credits to his name and a reputation as one of the country’s foremost theatrical performers. It had taken him, so the saying goes, 25 years to become an overnight sensation. But sensation he certainly was. In the years since Shine he has proved himself one of the truly great screen actors of his age, from the high art of 2000′s Quills (in which he presented us with the definitive Marquis de Sade) to the high camp of 1999′s Mystery Men (playing evil genius Casanova Frankenstein). In some sense a superstar character player, he has the rare combination of seemingly limitless range and the ability to disappear into a role to the point where all that is visible is arring it up as villainous buccaneer Barbosa in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, playing a shifty ex-pat in The Tailor Of Panama or giving voice to a pelican in Finding Nemo. This year he was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as Lionel Logue, speech therapist to George VI in The King’s Speech, another outstanding portrayal to add to his collection.

Rush recently supplied the voice for Tomar-Re in the forthcoming Green Lantern and this month returns as Barbossa in the fourth installment of the Pirates series, On Stranger Tides. Empire Contributing Editor Simon Braund interviewed him in Los Angeles. “I’ve interviewed Rush twice before,” says Braund, “and he remains an extremely accommodating subject: attentive, engaging, amusing (in a refreshingly Aussie way) and unfailingly thoughtful about his career. He will, for instance, discuss his creating of the character of Barbossa in as much detail as the demands of playing David Helfgott or Peter Sellers.”

EMPIRE: What were your first inklings that you wanted to be an actor?

RUSH: Oh, Lordy! It started when I was about eight, in the late 1950s. I grew up in Queensland and this was before they had television there. I caught the tail-end of the era of traveling vaudeville tent shows; they were like variety shows at night and a kind of hybrid British-Australian pantomime in the daytime. I used to see those in my school holidays and I thought it was the trippiest stuff I’d ever seen in my life.


EMPIRE: So the die was cast.


RUSH: Well, kind of. In those days, Australia had no existing film industry — we barely had a theatre industry — so on-one really set their sights on becoming a professional actor. I suppose I was the class clown at school; I’d get up and do improvisations and skits for the teachers. Then when I was in high school I got involved with the drama club, which we, the students, ended up running. When the ‘good’ English teacher moved on, we took over. Then I went off to university thinking I’d probably end up being a teacher or a radio announcer. God knows that, I had no idea. There was a lot of stuff happening on campus at the time, a very lively period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and during that time The Queensland Theatre Company was formed. The director of the company had seen a lot of my work and he invited me to join, so I signed a three-year contract with what in England you’d call a repertory company.

EMPIRE: While you were with the QTC you did all the classics — Sheridan’s The Rivals, The Fool in King Lear and so on…

RUSH: We did the classics and we did a lot of Australian stuff too, and the odd panto! I did Puss in Boots and Aladdin. I was talking to an old mate of mine a while ago who ended up working for the RSC, and I said, “It’s funny, when I started playing Barbossa I remember thinking, ‘I’ve been here before; this reminds me of something but I can’t think what it is.’” Of course, it was like doing panto. We had and English director who had me playing Simple Simon in Puss in Boots, which is like the Buttons character, the Idle Jack. The next year he wanted me to play Wishy-Washy in Aladdin. I said, “No, I want to do something different, I don’t want to play the same kind of role as last time.” So he cast me as Abanazar, the villain.

EMPIRE: Were you not a little young to be playing Abanazar?

RUSH: I was 21, 22. But it’s the kind of role where you find your inner villain. So years later when I was playing Barbossa, with a lot more skill and a lot more experience, I was drawing on the atavistic memory of playing Abanazar.

EMPIRE: We’ll get back to Barbossa, but another of your biggest successes with the QTC was playing Snoopy in a production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Do you have fond memories of that?

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You can read the rest of the interview in the June issue of Empire, on stands now!