Interviewer: Our guest tonight is Geoffrey Rush, the actor who played Albert Einstein in Genius, a series produced by National Geographic. Such a role doesn’t come along every day, but initially you refused to take it. Why?


Interviewer: It must have been hard to play such a complex character.

Rush: I can tell you it was demanding! In playing Einstein it was important not to ignore the contradictions of his character, most of which I was already aware of. I had read some time previously about his bohemian youth and comfortable bourgeois adult life. I also knew he was a pacifist wrongfully branded as the father of the atomic bomb. But there were also some aspects of his life I didn’t know about. Only when reading the script did I discover that with advancing age Einstein started to exhibit quirky behavior such as appearing in public in pyjama trousers or a dressing gown and wearing his wife’s shoes if he couldn’t find his own.

Interviewer: How was your appearance transformed to reflect the different stages of Einstein’s life?

Rush: Well, it was a result of close collaboration with the hair and make-up people. They gave me this sort of crinkled look and soft drooping eyelids. My hair was good enough for Einstein in his forties. However, different wigs were used for his older years. As for eyebrows, they had to be made considerably thicker, as mine almost don’t exist. Many of the reviewers particularly praised my nose. Funnily enough, it was my own.

Interviewer: You share your role with an actor playing the young Einstein. What was your experience of that, logistically?

Rush: Johnny Flynn was Einstein from his teens and I took over from around the age of 40. We didn’t do any scenes together but we portrayed the same person, so consistency was crucial for success. Before the filming started, we talked a lot about the script on Skype. A specialist from a drama school was also hired to give us both classes on Einstein’s vocal mannerisms. We had to learn to articulate sounds in the same way so that viewers wouldn’t hear the difference in our accents. We did some research but we knew we would have to improvise a lot in acting out our roles. While there is a lot of photographic material on Einstein, newsreel footage which could show us his gestures, is scarce. Another thing is that we had no idea what Einstein was like in private. So when the filming started we carefully observed each other to ensure our portrayals of Einstein were in sync.

Interviewer: And the last question. Is there anything about Einstein that particularly struck you?

Rush: Einstein had the right brain in the right place at the right time, which made him a genius. If, however, we leave aside his scientific achievements, we see a man who exhibited a lot of human weaknesses. He had doubts and was prone to depression. And just like everybody else he was vulnerable to temptation and often experienced mood swings. In many ways he wasn’t much different from the rest of us.

Interviewer: Geoffrey, thanks so much for joining us today.