Perched on a couch in a hotel suite during Toronto’s extravagant film festival last month, Geoffrey Rush was looking dapper in a fine gray suit with subtle pinstripes.
Indeed, for a guy going from press conference to on-camera spots to print interviews all in the service of a Queen’s bidding – “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” to be exact – he didn’t look rushed at all.
No pun intended.
Like Sir Francis Walsingham, his frightfully savvy and indispensable counselor in the – well, “sequel” doesn’t seem the right word for a story that catches up with Elizabeth I nearly 30 years into her rule – Rush knows a thing or two about giving advice.
As a matter of fact, he’d been getting mild guff from Cate Blanchett for the way he’s been recounting how he advised his fellow Aussie and longtime friend to reprise her role as the “Virgin Queen.”
Her 1998 turn in writer-director Shekhar Kapur’s “Elizabeth” earned Blanchett her first Oscar nomination and placed her high on the A-list.
“Cate buttonholed me a couple of weeks ago and said, ‘Will you please stop saying that you had to coerce me because I was getting too old to play the role.”‘
This, Rush insisted, wasn’t what he said. It certainly wasn’t what he meant.
“This role has such potential dimensions to it that are transcendent. It’s not just that you’re playing a monarch in a red wig,” he told her. “This woman is seething with internal conflicts. There’s a political strata to it. There’s a historical strata to it.”
Sure to take some hits for taking some liberties, “The Golden Age” is robust, old-fashioned fun.
Rush first met Blanchett when they were cast in an Australian production of “Oleanna,” David Mamet’s relentless play about power and gender on a college campus.
Blanchett was fresh out of drama school. Rush was waiting for “Shine,” which kept getting postponed. That 1996 film about pianist David Helfgott won Rush a best-actor Oscar. He has since been nominated for two others (for “Shakespeare in Love” and “Quills”). He won an Emmy for his portrayal of Peter Sellers in HBO’s miniseries “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.”
“Oleanna is a powerhouse piece,” he said. “You really have to rely on your fellow actor because it’s 65 minutes of bitching – great dialogue.”
Rush’s theatrical roots are not to be ignored. They so feed his approach to movies.
“I didn’t play major roles in film till I was in my 40s,” he said. And he’d been told by other actors not to do too much. Instead, they said, let the camera find you. This advice was less than illuminating for “Shine.”
“David Helfgott’s got an erratic kind of energy. You don’t internalize that. Otherwise you’re not going to be true to the aberration of his personality.”
He shared this worry with director Scott Hicks, who told him, “always be truthful, we’ll gauge the rest.”
Since then, Rush has mined for truth and has delivered performances that draw you near.
It’s a funny achievement for an actor who loves wide-angle spaces. “A lot of actors work their performance around the close-up,” he said “I found that the wide shot is where I do my best work.”
Before parting, Rush launches into an unsolicited riff on his first visit to the U.S. He’d flown in for a Denver International Film Festival screening of “Shine.”
The festival programmed a Chuck Jones animated short in front of “Shine.”
After the screening, Jones, who was in attendance, came up to the newly minted star.
“He was a little frail at the time,” recalled Rush. “He hugged me like Yoda and he said, ‘You understand timing.”‘
Indeed, Rush does.
“It was like a magic wand had been waved over me.”
