No 'Mystery': Rush relishes playing the villain

Geoffrey Rush is one of Australia's most respected stage and screen actors, having won an Academy Award for his performance in "Shine" and grabbing a second Oscar nomination for last year's runaway hit "Shakespeare in Love."

Known for his unique roles in art and independent films, Rush hangs up his Victorian robes and instead chooses to wear the costume of supervillain Casanova Frankenstein in "Mystery Men." The film centers around seven lame, wannabe superheroes who must stop Casanova Frankenstein from taking over Champion City by using their so-called "powers."

The Sun sat down with Rush to listen to find out what kind of evil thoughts went through his mind in order for him to play a supervillian with a quest for world domination.

Question: Geoffrey, were you having as much fun as it seemed playing the villain in "Mystery Men"?

Answer: It was a chore. The script shifted a lot, which was good, because by the time we had started to shoot the film, the cast was eclectic. Thankfully, a lot of the material, in subtle and tiny ways, tailored itself towards people's strengths and mad stuff that they come up with. When I first read the script, the scene at the beginning in the asylum -- which sort of set the tone -- Casanova Frankenstein, as part of his rehabilitation in the asylum, had been writing rock operas. I thought that to be very funny. There was something about that bizarre humor that really appealed to me. It stayed there.

Q: Did you surprise many people by choosing such a campy, big-budget Hollywood role when most moviegoers associate you with mostly independent or art films?

A: Well, as an actor, it was really a nice bit of timing. I was aware that I had just done "Les Miserable," "Shakespeare in Love" and "Elizabeth," all in one year. It was a nice stimulus to have a script come along. I was looking for something cheesier, and more playful. I wanted to vary my menu. My character is such a freak. There are villains, not even in every generation, their are villains every year, and thousands of villains in movies and literature who want to take over the world. But there was something about the freakish aspect of him that really appealed to me.

The reason he became German is that it struck me that there was some deep vibe and cultural fight between these blue collar, shopping mall types, these end-of-millennium, wannabe superheroes. Everything that Casanova Frankenstein aspires toward is a power base that is alien to that and is deeply rooted in European culture. Because we were shooting the film at Universal Studios, I was reading this book on Boris Karloff and Bela Legosi and reading about Carl Lamelle being from Bavaria ... it was an extraordinary series of coincidences.

One of the cinemas down in Santa Monica was running "The Black Cat" and I went and saw quite a few of those films. I thought that this is like the dark forest of Grimm's Fairy Tales that is being brought into American pop, and this way back in the 1930s. This film seemed to have a whiff of that to me and making my character German, it took away everybody's idea of a English villain as we've seen in the past 10 years.

Q: Did you draw upon any particular villain in literature or from a movie for inspiration?

A: No, because of the whole disco theme in the film, there wasn't an instant reference to who he was like. The whole film was like that. When I read (the script), that's what appealed to me. I couldn't actually say, you know, how people would say, "Oh, this is like 'Blade Runner' meets 'Mary Poppins' or this is 'Frankenstein' meets 'Zulu.' "

There was something about this film that I couldn't put my finger on and that's what seemed very attractive. There was a moment where Gloria Swanson's name kept coming up. My dialect coach and I kept saying, "This is going to be my Gloria Swanson moment." (Director Kinka Usher) kept saying that at the end of the film, my character would have to be completely insane and there was something about this staircase in my house and the madness of having the girl up there and these seven idiots down at the bottom of the stairs. I had this Nora Desmond moment.

Q: When we first meet Casanova Frankenstein, he has really long, unwashed hair, and his fingernails haven't been cut in years. He's really filthy and he looked a lot like Howard Hughes, didn't he?

A: Howard Stern, most people think (laughs). His looked evolved. In the original script, he was going to be a Hugh Hefner-type figure with a monogrammed straightjacket. I thought that would give away how he is for the rest of the film. I thought it would be interesting if he was like a hermit and some weird, unreadable figure so that we don't know whether he's weak and deranged or repentant, frail, cunning or whatever. He needed to have a Charles Manson, Jesus Christ, Messianic sort of quality.

We went for the idea of the long hair and the nails. It was like Howard Hughes being locked all those years in his hotel room. When we were shooting those scenes, Kinka is one of those directors who would have the camera down by your heels on a very wide lens, taking up the whole room. It was a graphic and visual sense that he wanted to create.

Q: You had some memorable one-on-one scenes with Greg Kinnear who plays Captain Amazing, didn't you?

A: It was good scripting. I met him in Sydney when he came out to promote "As Good As It Gets" and we hung out a bit and we came back on the same plane going to the Golden Globes. I didn't know him from his popular TV show ("Talk Soup"), but he's hilarious. He's got this brilliant mind that's trapped in a boy-next-door kind of look he always gave. We had fun. I think everyone sensed that. I think that (because the characters) were suburban and had pitfalls and weaknesses. They had something very ordinary about them that made them feel different.

Q: Where do you keep your Academy Award for "Shine"?

A: It's on the piano, which is not symbolic. It just happened to end up there.

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