Geoffrey Rush never played pirates as a child. “Instead I had a towel tied round my neck with my arms outstretched, running around like Superman” says Rush. “It was because the George Reeves superman series was on television.” This was back in the 1960’s in Queensland where Rush grew up. He was then like any other backyard boy. “We also watched Rawhide and Gunsmoke, and so we played a lot of Cowboys and Indians – but no pirates I’m afraid.”
Rush is now about as far from being a backyard Brisbane boy as you can get. He’s a Hollywood name, sought out for complex character roles on both sides of the Atlantic. He’s been the Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, the manic depressive Peter Sellers, the unrestrained Marquis de Sade, and is now revived as the villainous pirate Hector Barbossa for the third film in the Pirates of The Caribbean series. So he does know a thing or two about pirates and, like most of us, grew up with a clear idea of what pirates looked like and what they did.
“It’s amazing that even before the success of the first Pirates of The Caribbean film, the pirate gene has always remained alive,” says Rush. “It has been firmly held in place with Captain Hook and Long John Silver, the two great pirate characters.” These two famous fictional pirates – from J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan and Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island - both appeared at the turn of the nineteenth century, about 200 years after what is known as The Golden Age of Piracy. Rush is aware of the significance of the time delay. “We’ve been passed down a highly romanticised version of how ugly it really would have been.”
Highly romantic too are the swashbuckling Pirates of The Caribbean films, set in the mid 1700’s at the end of that Golden Age of Piracy, a period that grew out of the massive increase in shipping that passed through the Caribbean when the slave trade was at its peak. The end of a long European war fuelled the increase in piracy, as English sailors were discharged from naval duty. Thousands of idle trained seafarers were snapped up - by pirate captains and privateers with names like Blackbeard, Black Bart and Calico Jack – and put to use plundering passing ships. Rush’s villain is Captain Barbossa, a name influenced by another real life pirate – Barbarossa, or Redbeard – a Turkish corsair from the 15th century.
Rush believes that the most successful pirates focused carefully on building their reputation. “The famous ones were very smart at creating their brand identity so that a legend would build up around their name,” he says. “In the first film there was one actor in my crew who had to have a permanently smoking beard. This was inspired by the real Blackbeard – a man named Edward Teach - who liked to have smoke coming out of his beard so he looked like the devil and frightened people. In our film we had to wait for the crew to get a bunch of josticks alight before we could shoot the scene.”
Rush sees three very different pirate identities at work in the main characters in The Pirates of the Caribbean films. “There’s a certain heritage that Orlando Bloom has to bring to Will Turner, with a background in Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power. For my character Barbossa, the ancestry is more like Robert Newton as Long John Silver or Basil Rathbone as one of his villains. And then, of course, Johnny Depp has very smartly created a completely new iconic pirate figure for the character of Jack Sparrow.”
In the first film of the series, Rush’s Captain Barbossa is pitched as the villain of the piece, a man who stole Sparrow’s ship The Black Pearl in a mutiny, leaving the unfortunate Sparrow on a desert island with only a gun, one bullet, and a clear suggestion as to what to shoot. Yet Sparrow has his revenge and, at the end of the first film, he kills Barbossa with the same gun, same bullet. It came as a great surprise to many when Rush mysteriously re-appeared as Barbossa at the end of the second film, eating his trademark apple. Rush explains that this isn’t a cynical Hollywood revival of the dead in order to make a sequel. “It’s not cheap movie magic, and I’d need two and a half hours to explain how exactly I get back and where I’ve been,” he jokes. “But seriously, it’s great scriptwriting. The writers very cleverly created a thrilling cliff hanger at the end of part two, with its ‘to be continued’ energy, and you’ll love where part three goes.” Rush clearly enjoyed making this Hollywood blockbuster franchise – one that has hauled in treasures to the tune of a billion and a half dollars as it has circumnavigated the world’s screens. “Part three becomes very mythological,” says Rush, “with sea monsters, the battle at the end of the world, and a meeting of all the great pirate families.”
As well as these pirate storylines, there are multiple other plot lines to be pulled together in the third film: the love triangle between Will Turner, Jack Sparrow and Elizabeth Swann (played by Keira Knightley); Will’s dilemma with his father; and the return of Captain James Norrington (Jack Davenport), who originally proposed to Elizabeth, and who has now been promoted and put in charge of the East India Company fleet. “It’s like an elaborate chess game” says Rush, “and anyone who makes a wrong move risks being suddenly checkmated from the other side of the board.”
But Rush – who admits he hasn’t yet seen the final cut of the film – isn’t about to give too much away. He refuses to be drawn on whether Barbossa joins forces with Jack Sparrow, switching sides in the good versus evil showdown. “I’ll leave that to you to find out – but I think your expectations about Barbossa will meet with great surprise,” he says with a mischievous edge, worthy of any buccaneer.
The inspiration for Barbossa came not from any of the real pirates of the Golden Age, but from a visual source. “The production designer and costume designer were strongly influenced by a well known pirate artist who did these fantastic drawings” says Rush. “They give you a very playful, theatrical sense of what pirates were like, but in the colour plates you can see the toughness and grittiness of these characters.” Barbossa, it seems, was built from his clothes up, and Rush says it was the wide brimmed hat – complete with ostrich feather - that made the man. “They told me never to take the hat off. That’s the source of his power.”
Rush says that the rest was in the script. “There is one guy in the first film who says that Barbossa was ‘spat back out from hell’, and so I realised that I had to find something that warranted that,” he says. But Rush isn’t the kind of actor to rely upon one dimension for building a character. “At the same time you can see Barbossa’s delusional, romantic notion that he might one day be Commodore,” says Rush with an air of pride. “He’s got this self-importance and charm, he’s not dumb, and he has a level of language that is quite urbane.” Rush tells a story of how he came across one of Barbossa’s famous lines. “I dropped into a chat room on the net to see what the kids were talking about, and I discovered that they no longer say ‘no’ in response to others. They say ‘I am disinclined to acquiesce to your request’, and I thought for a moment how great it was for Barbossa have raised the level of debate on the Internet.”
It’s been a long ride for Rush from his days working on the stage with a young Mel Gibson in Waiting For Godot. He was tall and scrawny then, and fresh from a stint learning a very physical form of performance at the famous Jacques Lecoq Theatre school in Paris. He didn’t move into film until late in his career. “I partly fell into it,” he says. “I was physically the wrong type for many years. I remember thinking when Cowra Breakout was being made in 1984 that I could finally play a part - as a prisoner of war. I had the right skeletal look!” But it was more than ten years later – in 1995 - when Rush really made a mark on the screen. In a twelve-month period he made On Our Selection, Children of The Revolution, and of course Shine, the film that gave him an Academy Award for Best Actor. Since then there’s been no turning back, and he’s been able to divide his time between the larger than life characters of American and British films and some quieter roles in Australia. “It’s lovely when I get to chance to play parts in films like Lantana or Candy,” he says. “In a way, these are more suited to my actor’s palette. I get to be quieter and internalise the emotions.”
For now, however, there’s no holding back. With a brace of pistols in his waistband, a cutlass by his side, an apple near to hand, and of course his wide-brimmed hat, Rush has created a classic seafaring brigand who has come back from both the un-dead and the dead. Hector Barbossa is now alive and in charge of a deadly pirate crew, sailing to World’s End. Perhaps even George Reeves’ Superman couldn’t stop him.
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