Geoffrey Rush enjoys being a wild-haired genius
>> Before he caught the acting bug, Geoffrey Rush fancied himself something of a cosmologist, obsessed by space exploration and diligently studying maths, physics and chemistry.
So you might say the stars aligned when the director Ron Howard tapped him to portray Albert Einstein in National Geographic’s Genius. As the older Einstein, now at the miniseries’ forefront (Johnny Flynn portrays the younger), Rush plays the wild-haired scientist as a visionary and — dare we say sexy? — libertine, his celebrity rocketing after he unlocks the cosmos with his theory of relativity.
But there were a few things Rush, an Australian, wasn’t taught in school — the part about Einstein’s wives and lovers and unhappy children, or the anti-Semitism he faced from the nationalistic German physics community, which condemned his work as an impure Jewish science. “All of that was a revelation,” he said. “There were many, many elements that were very fresh.”
In a phone interview from his home in Melbourne, Rush, 65, spoke about his love of playing historical figures and his latest turn as Captain Hector Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, released last Friday. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q: What made you think you could do someone like Einstein justice?
A: I got a classic photo of the older Einstein. And I got a friend to take a photo of me and morph 15% of Einstein into my photograph to give me an indication [of how] to create a credible likeness. Then I got out a [marker] and put in the eyebrows, and some WiteOut, and I drew in the halo of the hair. So that was my own audition for myself. I sent it to Ron and said, “I think we can do this”.
Q: You also had to wrap your tongue around some highly complicated equations, and even those manage to be amusing.
A: There was some rapid-fire dialogue about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which is kind of a running gag because Einstein and Niels Bohr were constantly bickering — Einstein anti the theory, and Bohr very pro the theory. And they end up being a little bit like Abbott and Costello doing “Who’s on First”. Q: Why the fascination with playing historical figures like the Marquis de Sade, Peter Sellers, Leon Trotsky, even God? A: I suppose I’m drawn to — I’d call them all outsider figures. In my theatrical repertoire, I rarely played the central character. I was not the young heroic model for Hamlet. I tended to play those characters that orbited around them: the rogues and the rat bags and the idiots and the fools and the clowns that sway the plot somehow from a tangent. Just as in the same way that Einstein orbits what I think is the heart of this series: the epoch, an intense period of discovery and flourishing European science through two major catastrophic global wars. Einstein is an ideal Everyman.
Q: Einstein called nationalism “an infantile disease … the measles of mankind”. What would he make of our current situation?
A: He certainly would have found himself in pretty comparable territory — that globally there’s a rise to isolationism and nationalism, which echoes very strongly the world he was living in at the turn of the last century. But I think he’d be inspired. I left New York on Science Day [April 22], and tens of thousands of people were marching for the celebration of scientific discovery. I personally found that extraordinary. When I got to LA, in the paper there was a photo of the march and someone was holding up, above a sea of heads, a huge banner with an iconic portrait of Einstein on it saying, “This is what an immigrant looks like.” That tells us something about his legacy.
Q: You’ve played Barbossa in the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ franchise for nearly 15 years. Are you in it for the Bahamas vacation?
A: We shot this one in Queensland [Australia], which was great for me because it’s in my neighbourhood, roughly speaking. But I wouldn’t call it a vacation because they’re monstrous pieces. It’s back on track with the spirit of the first film. A lot of humour comes out of what is a dangerous quest because we’ve got Salazar [Javier Bardem] aiming to annihilate every pirate on the planet. You can find whatever contemporary metaphors are in that as you like.
Q: With an Oscar for ‘Shine’, an Emmy for ‘The Life and Death of Peter Sellers’ and a Tony for ‘Exit the King’, you’re just a Grammy short of an EGOT. What’s your plan?
A: Everyone says there are audiobooks. I don’t know — whatever. I’m happy with a TOE.