Rush defends emoji

ACTOR Geoffrey Rush sent an actress a text message with a winking “panting” tongue emoji saying he had been thinking of her “more than is socially appropriate”, a court has heard.

But the Hollywood star denied he was signalling a sexual attraction for his King Lear costar or “testing the water” to see what kind of response he would get.

The 67-year-old was being cross examined in his defamation trial against The Daily Telegraph after it reported a colleague had lodged a complaint with the Sydney Theatre Company over his “inappropriate behaviour”.

The actress was later named as Eryn Jean Norvill, who received a text from Mr Rush in June 2016 saying “I was thinking of you, as I do more than is socially appropriate”, followed by an emoji with its tongue out.

Mr Rush yesterday called it a “throwaway line” and an ironic joke in the style of comedian Groucho Marx.

“It’s a tagline to ‘you haven’t gone out of my mind’, because I was away for four months,” he told the Federal Court.

“It’s a very flip excuse for not being in touch enough, sooner.”

Mr Rush said he did not receive a response to his text.

The newspaper’s barrister Tom Blackburn SC referred to an earlier interview where Mr Rush said he developed a “stage door Johnny crush” on Ms Norvill when he saw her play Ophelia in Hamlet. Mr Rush said that was another example of “whimsy and irony”.

The court was previously told that Ms Norvill would give evidence that she was the target of sexual harassment during the King Lear season including one incident during a preview performance where Mr Rush ran his hand “down her torso and traced across her right breast”.

Mr Blackburn asked Mr Rush whether he had on a near daily basis during rehearsals made growling animal noises and groping hand gestures towards Ms Norvill that were intended to be “a caricature of sexual molestation”.

“You stuck your tongue out and licked your lips in an exaggerated way - a little like that little emoji?” he said.

“No… don’t you think any of the strong women like (costars) Helen Buday and Robyn Nevin would have come up to me and said “you’re acting like a galah’?” Mr Rush replied.

The Shine star denies any wrongdoing and claims two front page articles in the newspaper about the alleged incident painted him as a “pervert” and “sexual predator”.

The hearing continues.