‘There were a few lost years’: Geoffrey Rush is back. But don’t call it a comeback

For Geoffrey Rush, it was an upbeat experience. The 74-year-old actor had just watched a 30th anniversary screening of Shine, the Australian film that won him an Oscar and launched his Hollywood film career, on the Gold Coast.

Even better, Rush shared the stage with director Scott Hicks, a longtime friend, and David Helfgott, the colourful pianist he played in the film, for a Q&A session on Saturday evening.

It was an event organised by the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts, which once had Rush as president. Or “prez” as he joked about wanting to be called at the time.

But a lot has changed since the “prez” was regularly earning rave reviews for critically acclaimed performances – along with three more Oscar nominations for Shakespeare in Love, Quills and The King’s Speech – and had a recurring role as Barbossa in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

In a rare interview after the screening at the AACTA Festival, Rush wanted to make it clear – even before the first question had been asked – that he was not making a comeback.

“There were a few lost years,” he said. “Not too many. Not as many as people think.

“I get the buzz around people going, ‘Oh, a comeback’. No, no, no, [I] haven’t been [away].”

Instead, Rush said, “a tabloid stoush probably made me go into a reflective state for three or four years”.

That stoush came when Sydney’s Daily Telegraph ran the headline “King Leer” on a 2017 article that made allegations of “inappropriate behaviour” by Rush towards an unnamed co-star in the Sydney Theatre Company’s 2015-16 season of King Lear.

Rush sued Nationwide News for defamation and, after arguing that the paper portrayed him as a “pervert” and “sexual predator”, won a record $2.87 million in 2019.

His accuser was not named in the stories but was later revealed to be Eryn Jean Norvill, who played opposite Rush as Lear’s daughter Cordelia.

Norvill did not speak to the Telegraph but later gave evidence in court during the trial that the actor sexually harassed her, including by stroking down the side of her right breast to her hip during a preview performance of the play in late 2015.

Separately, Yael Stone alleged in 2018 that Rush had danced naked in front of her in their dressing room and used a mirror to watch her showering during Belvoir St Theatre’s 2010-11 season of The Diary of A Madman.

Rush denied Stone’s allegations and a Federal Court judge did not allow them to be heard in court during the trial.

“It hurt,” he said, reflecting on the case. “It hurt because of the environment in which it happened. I spoke to a writer friend who was a journo, who said I wouldn’t be surprised if they [the Telegraph] went, ‘even if it costs us a few million we’re really keen on having that pun on the front page of the paper’. But it was what it was. I’ve moved on.”

Asked what had got him through in the years since, he said: “I suppose being more honest with myself about the choices I’m making. I want to do things that excite me ...

“Maybe I’ll get back on stage [but] I don’t know if I’ve quite got the same zeal.”

Rush said he had appreciated support from family, friends and colleagues but was reluctant to be drawn on his feelings about Norvill and Stone.

“I got bemused by the various end-of-year ‘words of the year’ from different dictionaries,” he said. “Now, to any of those questions, I go ‘six, seven’. My birthday happens to be the sixth of July, so children think I’m blessed in a mystical way.”

He was less guarded about moving into a new phase of his career.

“When I sat back for a bit after the court case, I just looked at what I really wanted to do,” he said.

That meant just working on “very special projects”, and one appealing offer came in almost immediately after the court win.

American-Canadian director Des McAnuff offered him a part in a film of King Lear, which had Christopher Plummer in the title role.

“I read the script, and it was a very good compression,” Rush said. “I said, ‘look, I’ll have a big think about it’, just because of my circumstances.”

When Plummer died aged 91 in 2021, McAnuff asked Rush to play Lear. “I went, ‘wow, good part, wrong time’,” he said.

There were also “silly offers”, including The Comey Rule, a miniseries about FBI director James Comey during the 2016 election and early years of Donald Trump’s first presidency.

“They said, ‘would you play President Trump?’,” he said. “Look, I’d like to think I’m a versatile character actor, but he’s a potato, and I’m a piece of asparagus ... I said I’m just the wrong guy. Thankfully, Brendan Gleeson got the role and he was sensational.”

Director Oren Moverman asked him to play Groucho Marx in Raised Eyebrows – a film that is currently on the backburner.

“It’s evolved into the most fantastic non-biopic script,” Rush said. “I call it a tragi-comedy about mortality.”

One film he did shoot was alongside John Lithgow, another longtime friend, in James Ashcroft’s 2024 New Zealand psychological thriller The Rule of Jenny Pen, set in a nursing home.

That film, and other screenings of a restored 4K version of Shine, have taken him to festivals around the world, which he said was “a great connection point for me to keep up on the buzz”.

In two weeks, Rush will head to New Zealand again, to shoot Tom Hern’s comedy Shearing The Love.

And he has a film he can’t talk about yet, from “a maestro filmmaker”, due out later in the year.

More comfortable ground for Rush is talking about the impact Shine had on his life.

“My career is now 55 years old,” he said. “Shine, my second feature film, just opened the door like in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. I went in one side and came out the other. It was quite transformational and quite an adventure.”

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