by Reuben Lazarus and Gill Pringle
Australia’s own Geoffrey Rush steps back into Barbossa’s shoes for the latest Pirates instalment, and here discusses everything from the contemporary allusions in the film, his contributions to the franchise and how two Oscar winners, him and Javier Bardem, looked like two crabs about to have sex.
What keeps bringing you back to this series?
Look, I could say it’s the pay cheque but that would be vulgar. No, it’s more creative than that. Initially, I was only going to be in the first film which was just called Pirates of the Caribbean and then we started to get daily memos called ‘Curse of the Black Pearl’ and at that moment when we saw the semicolon we knew, “hmm sequels”. But I also read towards the end and went “oh, I die. That’s interesting. Oh well, I had fun”.
I played the badass villain who was this creature that was spat out of the mouth of hell. But then they got back to me and said “We’re going to shift the whole story. The whole saga is going to move to Asia and Singapore, and there is going to be a new villain. But you’re going to come back because the bigger story that happens in part 3 is all about the global pirate lords coming together, and they need to be amassed by Barbossa, and Tia Dalma is going to bring you back to life, with voodoo”. Great….
I had one fan write to me and say, “In the second film, I spotted Barbossa’s boots in the back of the shot in Tia Dalma’s house”. Which was sort of put in for that type of Easter egg buff to go “what’s going on here?”
So there is a nice depth of storytelling that makes it feel like he is back for a purpose.
Barbossa also changes emotionally in every one of the films. Is there something different about him? Is that all script or is that some of your input?
I make some input like I liked becoming the politician to get the G20 of pirates together. And the great thrill of that is that we had some amazing actors who came in for that round-table scene.
All the way through, we’ve had Chow Yun Fat, we’ve had Bill Nighy, and we’ve had Ian McShane, and now we have Javier Bardem. Two Oscar winners in the same film.
I liked it when I played Barbossa when he was working for King George The Second in the last film, the script was a little more blatant that this was a ploy. I spoke with [writer] Terry Rossio and said that I think that it should play as just a vanity of just working for a nicer type of person, not pirate scum. So, the twist at the end, that he is actually after the ‘Fountain of Youth’, that he was always after the big guns, and he always has to talk his way into staying alive. So, there was a bit of contribution there.
And now that he is the corporate CEO, with vulgar wealth, it rings a lot of contemporary bells, doesn’t it? I like that and I like that there is the secret from the past that was going to maybe reveal some vulnerability. Looking back, having read that, I thought that it thematically fit in very well. We can’t give spoilers, but the family bonds over a generation are now part of the story with Will and Elizbeth’s son and all that.
Can you talk about Javier Bardem as an acting partner?
We were always wanting to avoid the clichés and the fact that Salazar is almost a terrorist metaphor; the rage and the kind of zeal behind wanting to obliterate every pirate from the face of the earth. I did a lot of my interviews with Javier when we were in Shanghai and Paris, and it was great listening to him talk about the Naval Code of Honour in the 18th century, and for that to have been besmirched by a pirate and to put him into maritime purgatory for 25 years, he was working on a blend of rage and pain. That’s a great actor, thinking of those elements, and he had all the silicon pieces on set, he was very scary. No one had ever told me he was going to have black squid ink coming out of his mouth on every line of dialogue. So, the first scene we did is very dialogue driven, and I’m off scene going “oh, Jesus Christ! What must this guy smell like!” It gave me something to work with, because I had to be nice to Salazar, and I said, “you look like a prawn that’s gone off in the sun”. Javier was dazzled when he saw the finished product, we’d seen some previews and artwork, but the hair suddenly became so menacing and kind of grand in a way.
Salazar is a psychopath. He would approach me on his sticks looking like a crustacean and I’m there on my crutch with my wooden leg and the two of us kind of dancing around with the dialogue. We looked like two crabs about to have sex. So, it was nice to have those sorts of extraordinary images to play with.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is in cinemas May 25, 2017
