Geoffrey Rush Plays Royal Pit Bull Sir Francis Walsingham

Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush has just finished work on a huge franchise — the blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, of course. Or is that quadrilogy? We'll get to that later — and now he finds himself entrenched in another. Rush lets us in on the man behind the Queen: the tenacious Sir Francis Walsingham.

It seems like your character in this film is more on the sidelines and less orchestrating things like he was in the original Elizabeth — did you have a different sort of approach to this role?
Shekhar said to me two years before we started filming, when the idea of the project was looming — because there're quite different chapters in these two films and quite different historical timeframes — he said, "Your role obviously in the first film was that you were 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." 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.

It's said that you were in large part responsible for this movie being made. That you really had to pull and cajole —
I didn't sign any checks or anything like that.

You talked Cate into do it — what made you so passionate about seeing this project reborn?
Look, there's a number of elements, and there's a certain mythology to that story now. Shekhar and Cate and I had a fleeting opportunity — I can't remember, three or four years ago, it was like 2003/2004 — where we all happened to be in LA for about the one evening and through all the various coordinators and publicists and minders, we said, "Let's set aside a couple of hours and really talk this thing 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 going over 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 theater back in the early '90s and knew her very much as a colleague and a friend, I just leaned on her and said, "Even in the theatrical repertoire, as you get older, the roles become less. You know if you're into Shakespeare, yes, you've got Queen Margaret to look forward to and a few other things like that — maybe a Cleopatra and etc. — and even in terms of film, it's probably going to be even less opportune. And a great multidimensional 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, because I'm very into the notion of virtuosic performance in people — I think it always should 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.

What is it about Cate and this role that is so special?
I supposed very broadly and 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 and I think it was a 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 such detail — whether it's through the politics of the court, whether its through the marriage of two people, whether it's a romance or its a comedy — he takes those broader outer externals and gives you a huge world picture to grapple with in the two or three hours of the entertainment. And at the same time, he also gives you an extraordinarily deep internal world within principle characters, and not just the central character. You know, you take any of the histories like Henry IV — you've got Falstaff, and you've got Prince Hal, and you've got Henry IV, the major players, you've got Pistol and Bardolph — you've got all the team, and you know what the internal conflicts of each of those characters are. I think that 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. We are still looking at what happens when countries go to war over religious conflict at a very specific point in history. And what happens on that internal life as a woman ages being in 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 [of] the ruler [as] anointed by God, and that they are 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 own age to get a sense of that.

In the last Pirates of the Caribbean film, it seems to set up a fourth movie. Would you consider returning to the role of Capt. Barbossa?
It all depends on script and ideas, and I would say that Disney executives and all the people in Jerry [Bruckheimer]'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."

So you could see No. 4 in some form coming along.
Possibly. I'd rather see No. 3 on Elizabeth, because it is a mighty story. It's now beyond history — it's almost mythical, it's almost legendary. 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. 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 even imagine 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? Although I am hinting that I might like to come back as a ghost — Hamlet's father comes back and it's one of the great scenes.

What was it like this time working with Cate ten years on, in this environment with the characters the same, but things so different and the same director?
It's like — whatever reaction people have to the blockbuster franchises — and this has been the summer where if you look in the trades, people, speculators, "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. The box office figures I read the other day are up some phenomenal percentage. Shrek 3 and Transformers and Pirates — everyone did well out of it. For us as actors, having spent a lot of time in repertory theater and being a kind of contract player for two years or three years at different points in my career with different companies — this is the surrogate cinema equivalent that you can get from that. 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 departments, 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," I think is how Tom Stoppard described it in Shakespeare in Love.

You have a breakthrough moment with Elizabeth in which you tell her that the laws are to protect the people, but then we discover your character has fallen into a trap set by Spain. How much does that parallel to modern politics and were you thinking about that at all in telling this story that there was a contemporary side to it?
I wasn't looking for direct parallels, but I think by inference — you know, Walsingham is now being discovered — and I think it's got very little to do with my presence in these films — there's just been two recent, very significant and very important 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 kind of figures in British history ... [Benjamin] Disraeli. Because [Walsingham] did really create and set up a blueprint that I think probably is still the foundation stone of most contemporary secret service activity. He revved it up. He more than surged — You look for certain resonances, but I don't think it's necessary to try to play it so that the audience go, "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. I'm hoping that films like this are perceived as dramas, that people go into the kind of mixture of legend and storytelling and dramatic constructs, and that the films become a trailer for those people who want to go and Google "Dr. Dee," [Elizabeth's personal advisor,] and say, "Who was this guy?" and "What was going on there?" Because he was a major, major figure that's 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.

Do you have a role that you're still looking to play at some point?
Not particularly...I mean if I didn't have to ride a horse — I just don't do equine — I just love the Don Quixote story, again on this level of legend and mythology and the fantastical storytelling dimensions of it. I think that it still speaks volumes about that gulf between aspiration and delusion. The great Chuck Jones quote to me certainly defines 20th century thinking: Bugs [Bunny] being who we would like to be and Daffy [Duck] being who we really are. And that's there in Don Quixote, as well.