Legendary actor Geoffrey Rush: ‘It’s good to represent septuagenarians and octogenarians’

Geoffrey Rush reflected on more than five decades of an acting career in the Catalan seaside town of Sitges, where this week he receives the Time Machine Award for a lifetime achievement in the entertainment industry. 

The Australian, who won a Best Actor Academy Award in 1997 for his role in Shine, said that “it’s good to represent” elderly people in films, as there “aren’t many films with a septuagenarian or octogenarian in the cast.” 

“It’s good to represent people who have had similar cultural and life experiences through the decades,” he said, before joking that filling out online forms can be tricky when he has to scroll and scroll to reach his year of birth: “I don’t think they’ve got 1951 in there.”

Overall, in the latter half of his life, Rush rated the enjoyment of his career with a mark of 10/10. “You do get reflective” in old age, Rush explained. “This is my 53rd year performing. It’s been rewarding. I knew as a child I loved play, and I didn’t know I could make a career out of it.” Rush also said that he’s worked on “quite a few duds,” but nevertheless, “I liked all of them, I like the job.” 

Rush is visiting the Sitges International Fantasy and Horror Film Festival to present his latest work, The Rule of Jenny Pen, directed by James Ashcroft, which is competing in the official selection at the festival. 

The film is an unsettling thriller that follows two rivals, played by Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow, who are residents of a care home. A retired judge is hospitalized in an asylum after suffering a stroke, where he falls into the clutches of a twisted patient, who uses a child’s doll as an instrument to impose his will on the poor inmates. 

Choosing roles 

When asked about how he chooses the type of role he goes for, Rush feels “there’s an instinct” to it, and was quick to praise the script for making the story “burst into life.” 

“I knew by page five this was a very special document because it burst into life very vividly with skill. I hadn’t quite played this sort of character, although I do play a few mad people, but this talked to me.” 

For his role in The Rule of Jenny Pen, he says his “homework had been done” by the scriptwriters Eli Kent and James Ashcroft, who “had investigated the institution of age care and the buried conflict between Crealy and Mortensen,” the two main characters. 

Rush was also connected with “a specific neurological doctor to be precise about certain things,” as the film takes place in a care home. 

The legendary actor is also “very interested in biographical reading” and feels that reading about people’s lives “often feels far more interesting than fiction.” 

Pirates of the Caribbean 

Rush, who played Captain Hector Barbossa in the Pirates of the Caribbean, was asked about a possible new film in the franchise, and about Johnny Depp in light of the domestic abuse allegations made against him in recent years. 

Geoffrey Rush avoided pronouncing explicitly on Depp, but instead referred to the “pages and pages of my reactions” which are already published online on websites such as IMDb: “you can read them, you can quote the, and paraphrase them all you like.” 

He did, however, speak fondly of Penelope Cruz and joked about making a new film in which he could drink from the “fountain of youth” and use CGI to make him look “fantastically young” and run away to marry Cruz, before “on the night of our wedding, the liquid wares off.”

“It was like a family,” on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean, Rush reflected. One of the most touching moments for him while working on the famous franchise was when Pablo, who played Jack the Monkey in the films, presented him with “the most beautiful painting” nearing the end of shooting. 

“It was like a 1950s American abstract, a lot of brown, strokes of green through it, a bit like Miró, and he signed with a paw print,” Rush said. “He knew that painting would end up in a gallery at some point.”