Geoffrey Rush Interview, Elizabeth The Golden Age

MoviesOnline sat down with Geoffrey Rush at the Los Angeles press day for his new movie, "Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” directed by Shekhar Kapur from an original screenplay by William Nicholson ("Gladiator”) and Michael Hirst ("Elizabeth”). Reprising the roles they originated in seven-time Academy Award-nominated "Elizabeth,” Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush return for a gripping historical thriller laced with treachery and romance. Joining them in the epic is Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh, a dashing seafarer and newfound temptation for Elizabeth and Abbie Cornish who plays Elizabeth’s favorite lady-in-waiting.

"Elizabeth: The Golden Age” commences a decade after the period covered in "Elizabeth” and examines the glorious middle years of her rule when Queen Elizabeth I (Blanchett) faces bloodlust for her throne and familial betrayal. Growing keenly aware of the changing religious and political tides of late 16th century Europe, Elizabeth finds her rule openly challenged by the Spanish King Philip II (Jordi Molla)--with his powerful army and sea-dominating armada--determined to restore England to Catholicism. Preparing to go to war to defend her empire, Elizabeth struggles to balance ancient royal duties with an unexpected vulnerability in her love for Raleigh (Owen).

As she charts her course abroad, her trusted advisor, Sir Francis Walsingham (Rush), continues his masterful puppetry of Elizabeth's court at home--and her campaign to solidify absolute power. Through an intricate spy network, Walsingham uncovers an assassination plot that could topple the throne. But as he unmasks traitors that may include Elizabeth's own cousin Mary Stuart (Samantha Morton), he unknowingly sets England up for destruction.

Geoffrey Rush etched a memorable portrait of Elizabeth’s great adviser Walsingham in "Elizabeth.” The opportunity to take the character further than had been explored in "Elizabeth” was a determining factor in Rush’s decision to return to the role. The Oscar winner was more than eager to again plumb the depths of such a powerful man, whom some considered as slippery as he was savvy. Rush comments, "Walsingham was the great spymaster. He moved his way into a very powerful position in Elizabeth’s court and, by the 1580s, he was masterminding one of the greatest espionage networks throughout Europe. He was an intellectual of that age and was the person that created the powerful notion of the ruler being a divine figure. He was a person of great discipline and control, as was his Queen.” Geoffrey Rush delivers another stellar performance in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age.” Here’s more of what he had to tell us about his new film:

MOVIESONLINE: IN ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE, YOUR CHARACTER IS MUCH MORE ON THE SIDELINES ORCHESTRATING THINGS. DID YOU HAVE A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO THAT ROLE THIS TIME?

GEOFFREY RUSH: Shekhar said to me two years before we started filming, when the idea of the project was looming. He said — because there are quite different chapters in these two films and quite different historical time frames — he said, "Your role obviously in the first film was that you are mentoring this young woman coming to a position of power, and that she was deeply reliant on your philosophical and political resourcefulness." And he said, "I think the most interesting thing to explore, now that she's 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." I think you should talk to Shekhar. He's quite interesting and I don't really want to borrow his words. He spoke very much about those who were the immortals and those who were the mortals within the universe of this story. And he said, as we know historically, he dies, and really the whole role for me was following that trajectory through to loyalty until the death.

MOVIESONLINE: IS IT TRUE YOU WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR GETTING THE FILM MADE?

GEOFFREY RUSH: I didn't sign any cheques or anything like that. [laughs]

MOVIESONLINE: WHAT MADE YOU SO PASSIONATE ABOUT SEEING THIS PROJECT REBORN?

GEOFFREY RUSH: There are a number of elements and there's a certain mythology to that story now. I mean Shekhar and Cate and I had a fleeting opportunity about — I can't remember — 3 or 4 years ago. It was like 2003, 2004, where we all happened to be in L.A. for about the one evening. And through all the various co-ordinators and publicists and minders, we said let's set aside a couple of hours and really talk this idea through.

I think from Cate's point of view she may have felt — well, it's a role I've played, and as you can see from her repertoire since she first blazed onto the scene 10 years ago, she's a very exploratory, very risk-taking and very unpredictable chooser of repertoire, and maybe she felt that reinventing the same character was not going to be as great a challenge as she would like. But because I'd worked with Cate in the theatre back in the early Nineties 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. If you're into Shakespeare, yes you've got Queen Margaret to look forward to and a few other things like that, maybe Cleopatra . . ." But 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.” And I wanted to be there on the sidelines watching her rev up those Rolls Royce engines, ‘cause it's a great — I'm very into the notion of virtuosic performance in people. I think it should always be an aspiring level where you can thrill an audience with the magnitude of your imagination and Cate to me is very much that kind of actress.

MOVIESONLINE: WHAT WAS IT LIKE WORKING WITH CATE NOW AFTER 10 YEARS?

GEOFFREY RUSH: You know, it's like — whatever reaction people have to the blockbuster franchises — this has been the summer where — if you look in the trades, people speculate, is this the end of the industry as we know it, and how much is it transforming? But it seems as though audiences and bank balances and everyone's won out. I mean the box-office figures I read the other day are up some phenomenal percentage and — Shrek 3 and Transformers and Pirates, and everyone did well out of it.

For us as actors, having spent a lot of time in repertory theatre and being a kind of contract player for two years or three years at different points of my career with different companies. This is the surrogate cinema equivalent that you can get from that, because with Pirates we were together from September, 2002, and we finished the press junket in June, this year, so 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, and I think the same is true of Elizabeth. Having worked on that over a 10-year span, you get a little taste of being a band of fellows — which I think is how Tom Stoppard described it in Shakespeare In Love.

MOVIESONLINE: WHAT IS IT ABOUT CATE AND THIS ROLE THAT IS SO SPECIAL?

GEOFFREY RUSH: I suppose very broadly — I'll use another theatrical reference — to me, without going into whether it was Shakespeare who really wrote the plays, because that debate seems to be firing up again, someone wrote them — I think it was the glover's son from Stratford — to me his plays deal on such a fantastically wide level of experience — it's mostly he looks at the outer world in great detail, whether it's through the politics of the court or whether it's through the marriage of two people, whether it's a romance or whether it's a comedy, he takes those broader, outer externals and gives you a huge world picture to grapple with in the 2 or 3 hours of the entertainment. And at the same time he also gives you an extraordinarily deep internal world within principal characters, and not just the central character — I mean, you take any of the histories like Henry IV. I mean — you've got Falstaff and Prince Hal and you've got Henry IV, the major players. You've got Pistol and Bardulph — you've got all the team, and we know what the internal conflicts of each of those characters are.

And I think Elizabeth: The Golden Age, as a script, probably even more than the first film, gives the actress playing that role those kinds of challenges to meet. I mean we are still looking at what happens when countries go to war over religious conflicts at a very specific point in history. And what happens on that internal life as a woman ages being at 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 (that) the ruler was anointed by God and that they were sort of a much more spiritually, stately kind of figure than the pragmatism of modern politics. We have to look maybe to the Dalai Lama in our age to get a sense of that in some way. Certainly not the people who were at APEC in Austria. [laughter]

MOVIESONLINE: YOU HAVE A BREAKTHROUGH MOMENT WITH ELIZABETH WHERE YOU TELL HER THE LAWS ARE DIFFERENT FOR CERTAIN PEOPLE. HOW DO YOU THINK SOME OF THE EVENTS IN THIS FILM PARALLEL MODERN POLITICS AND GIVE A CONTEMPORARY FACE TO AN HISTORICAL DRAMA?

GEOFFREY RUSH: I wasn't looking for direct parallels, but I think by inference — Walsingham is now being discovered, and I think it has very little to do with my presence in these films, but there have just been two recent, quite very significant and very important new biographies on his life, and people are starting to ask, why isn't he as well known as Churchill or Wellington or any of the other great figures in British histories. Disraeli. Because he did really create and set up a blueprint that I think is probably still the foundation stones of most contemporary secret service activity. And he revved it up. He more than surged. In his time, from when he came back from Paris in the early Seventies to when he died in ‘93, I think he more than trebled the activities of his underground network.

You look for certain resonances, but I don't think it's necessary to try and play it so that the audiences goes — oh, get it? Hopefully they bring their own understanding of that and maybe become intrigued by the fact that these kinds of things are 400 or 500 years old. Some of the press challenge — there have been people who nitpick about the historical accuracy, and I go — well, the major sequence of events in this film — I can't quite remember when the Babington plot happened, that was a huge thing in its time, but Mary Queen Of Scots was beheaded in 1586 and the Armada was 1588 and Walsingham died in 1593. I can't remember specifically when Raleigh came back from the New World, but generally . . . I’m hoping that films like this are perceived as dramas, that people go into the kind of mixture of legend and story-telling and dramatic constructs, and that the films become a trail for those people who want to go google Dr.D. and say, who was this guy, what's going on there, because he was a major major figure forgotten by history that David Threlfall plays in the film. And I find that intriguing because in our more pragmatic contemporary world, it's again hard to imagine the astrologer, scientist, philosopher, alchemist all being enveloped in the one kind of Elizabethan mind, but that was the case.

MOVIESONLINE: IS THERE A CHERISHED CHARACTER YOU'D LOVE TO PLAY?

Not particularly. No. Not even theatrically. I mean, if I didn't have to ride a horse — I just don't do equine. [laughter] I just love the story and 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 20^th Century thinking — Bugs being who we would like to be and Daffy being who we really are. And that's there in Don Quixote as well.

MOVIESONLINE: THE LAST "PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN” SETS UP A FOURTH MOVIE. WOULD YOU CONSIDER RETURNING TO THE ROLE OF CAPTAIN BARBOSSA IF THERE WERE A PIRATES 4?

GEOFFREY RUSH: It all depends on script and ideas and — I would say that Disney executives and all of the people in Jerry's firm — I can't imagine them, with the kind of box-office receipts they've had, saying "That was a very aesthetically pleasing scenario, now let's move on to something else.” [laughter] I'd rather see number 3 on Elizabeth because it is a mighty story. It is now 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 — George III, I think, was on the throne for 60 years. That's like having a leader of America since the end of the Second World War running the country. You know what I mean? So there are huge dimensions in those legends and in those myths. And I know that Shekhar, being the kind of thinker and provocateur that he is, he might imagine like almost a one-woman film, because Elizabeth apparently absolutely refused to die. She stayed standing in her early 70s, I think it was, and I think Shekhar is very intrigued by the notion of — having achieved immortality on earth, what happens when you meet that deadline? And I would love as an audience member — although I'm hinting that I'd love to come back as a ghost. (laughs) Why not? Hamlet's father comes back and it's one of the great scenes.

"Elizabeth: The Golden Age” opens in theaters on October 12^th.