For a star who has won an Oscar, a Tony and an Emmy for best actor, it’s a bit of a shock that Geoffrey Rush is best known for playing a crusty pirate.
Rush has portrayed Captain Hector Barbossa in five “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies dating back to 2003, which is pretty good considering that he expected to be done after just the one since Barbossa is shot and seemingly killed at the end of “The Curse of the Black Pearl.”
“I read it and I went, ‘Oh, he gets shot at the end. That’s a nice dramatic arch,’ ” Rush says. “I get to be quite narcissistic and malevolent all the way through. I have about 30 seconds at the end, where I’m back in the land of the living and then I take a bullet in the heart. But they never explained to me that the film would become so successful that they were going to create a trilogy and that Barbossa would eventually make his way back into the storyline.”
So here we are 14 years later, with the fifth film, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales,” opening in theaters on May 26.
amNewYork spoke with Rush about the film.
Did you ever think after all these years that you’d still be playing Barbossa?
No. I thought it was a one-off for me. I first got the script called “The Pirates of the Caribbean” back in 2002 and my agent encouraged me to do it. From my old days as an actor I always loved shaking things up and doing different things. I’ve done a series of period-based films where I seem to be in tights a lot. Elizabethan films. … I wanted to be in a comedy and I did the “Banger Sisters” with Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon and that was a tremendous amount of fun. And the idea of playing a villain — I remember Gore Verbinski wrote me a really lovely cover note about the character. He said, “I really admire actors like Alec Guinness and Sterling Hayden; what they seem to be doing on the outside has interesting contradictions with what’s going on inside the character.”
What was the experience like working with co-star Johnny Depp?
I was a massive fan of his. Very adventurous and chameleon-like qualities as a great character actor. Fortunately trapped in the handsome body of a leading man.
What’s your take on Barbossa’s role in this film?
Well, there’s been an evolution all the way through [the series], where at times he’s been more of the elder statesman, which certainly appeals to his narcissism and his fantasy of getting all the global pirates together like a sort of G-20 consortium. Then I got to work as King George II’s right hand man. There’s something nice about being able to rub Jack Sparrow’s nose in the dark as the scum that he is. [Laughs] And then in this one, I’ve sort of become a corporate CEO, because of the power of … what I gained from Blackbeard’s demise [in the previous “Pirates” film, “On Stranger Tides”]. And I loved it in this last one, where they threw in a wild card, it was sort of a secret, I suppose that we can’t really talk about. [But] that … allowed me the possibility that there might even be some sense of vulnerability or even selflessness or doubt inside that crusty creature called Barbossa and I enjoyed those new dimensions.
You won a Tony in 2009 for your starring role in “Exit the King,” which was your Broadway debut. Will you be back on the New York stage sometime soon?
I’m a great New York theater fan. It was one of the real highlights of my career back in the 2009 season, which if you remember in the aftermath of the [global financial crisis] in 2008, so many big shows closed that winter. But resilient as Broadway is, suddenly I was surrounded, I was part of that village community of theaters where they were putting on plays by [Friedrich] Schiller, “Mary Stuart,” there was a “Waiting For Godot” on, there was “Desire Under the Elms.” It was a very exciting time. And to be able to go to Broadway with the basis of a production that we created in Australia … was really, really very special.
