Top 33 Geoffrey Rush Quotes

I like roles that are on the extreme ends of the spectrum, and there’s special appeal in exploring these slightly forgotten plays that people might think of as subjects for academic term papers instead of live theater.

People tend to think of Brisbane as a sleepy, sub-topical place. I don’t know. It’s like Baltimore or something. I don’t know. You would hear the family dramas going on behind closed doors.

I think that Ionesco’s greatest weapon is that he’s able to make us laugh at the darkest corners of our souls.

Nobody ever said that growing old would be easy. Just having to hold the newspaper out in your forties and then hair growing out of unusual parts of your body in your fifties. It’s tough on the ego.

I did not want to put myself on the line, as an Australian playing Britain’s greatest comic actor. The fans of Sellers are obsessive, possessive – and aggressive. I did not want to risk their anger – or my own reputation.

It’s their story, and I got to be the guy in the back while they were in the foreground.

I’m a very amateur scientist. For me, it started with the Mercury space program and onward to the moon landing in my impressionable adolescent years.

Sometimes you do feel a script that glows in your hand the moment you start reading it. By page four of Shakespeare in Love, I said, ‘I have to be in this movie.’

When people come to me and tell me I was terrific in this or that, I do not want to fall flat on my face the next time. But, tough, I have fallen flat before. You just get up and dust yourself off.

What I appreciated was the fact that the script delved into how Australians were – and still are – condescended to by the English.

Being in my more senior years now, you hope somewhere along the track that you’re going to get to collide with a role that feels very special, and Einstein is such a magnificent figure.

Someone told me that there’s a connection to Superman, that in an early edition of the Green Lantern comics, Tomar Re was the envoy to Krypton. That was fascinating to me.

There’s four biggies. There was Elizabeth I, George III, Victoria, and the current queen, who really dominated four eras.

People are intrigued and fascinated, almost obsessed with the private lives of great public personalities.

Most films I’ve worked on have had large casts, but they’ve been wonderful people. I think the monkey in Pirates of the Caribbean is the most temperamental costar I’ve had. It would throw tantrums like you wouldn’t believe.

You had to be into sport and, sad to say, I’m a traitor to my country because I don’t have a sporting bone in my body.

This is what happens when you are on the wrong side of 40. Young adults, who could be your children, are now working with you. I was playing their parents or mentor. I started to think: Oh, I am not part of that group any more.

I was not the young heroic model for ‘Hamlet.’ I tended to play those characters that orbited around them: the rogues and the rat bags and the idiots and the fools and the clowns that sway the plot somehow from a tangent.

With ‘Call Me by Your Name,’ they locked off the camera and let scenes play out in long, wide shots to make them feel almost voyeuristic.

Yeah, well, the F-bomb – it’s become as ubiquitous as the word ‘like.’ People just throw the word ‘like’ around as punctuation. And I think in a lot of everyday speech, the F-bomb has become a kind of dash or a comma.

My eye muscles hurt now when I read our MasterCard bill.

I always had a fantasy of being a chef, because I like kitchen life.

I was never a leading man. I’ve always been in the outer concentric circles in the company, being a character actor, which is a good place to be. It gives you that diversity.

I wouldn’t mind meeting some of the people I’ve attempted to portray from the olden, olden days. They probably would all have really terrible skin and horrible bad breath, and I’d have to give them an Altoid.

Einstein was very attracted to Mozart. There’s a mathematical, classical structure to the music, and I think he identified with that very strongly. I think there also is a connection between being a genius and a polymath.

If you’re in an Egyptian film and you’re not Egyptian, you have to wear mascara and stuff like that.

I didn’t know the Green Lantern comics at all. I was a Superman reader.

I dreamt of being an astronomer; I had a series of ‘How and Why’ books on the planets and the stars. At that stage, there were only 14 galaxies; now there are multiverses, dark matter, the nano-microscopic world of the interior of atomic structure.

As an actor, I’m ambivalent because I’m focused on the other person and what they’re giving me, what I need to be giving them, and what the character is thinking.

Some people are very good at being themselves and being very natural on screen or being very sexy or handsome or whatever. I like that, and I aspire towards that, but I don’t know if I always make it. I work very hard.

The hero of the ‘Peanuts’ is Charlie Brown. I play the dog that sleeps on the top of his dog box who’s a philosopher. I’m drawn to that. So I’m drawn to Barbossa as I’m drawn to Einstein, because they are outsiders, and I suppose, as a character actor, that’s the turf that you’re locked into, in a way.

I always felt thrilled and amazed that I could put actor on my tax form.

I die in almost every film I’ve been in.