OK, you've just won an Oscar for an indie film that no one thought anyone would ever see. Then you starred in two flicks set in the time of Elizabeth I, Virgin Queen of England, which you didn't think anyone would see. Now you, aka Geoffrey Rush goes American in the biggest way possible, as evil vicious bad guy in the movie based upon comic book characters The Mystery Men

CrankyCritic: Did you have as much fun making this movie as it looked like you did?
Geoffrey Rush: Yeah, it was pretty wild. When I was talking about this film a year ago and I'd say I'm going to do a film with Janeane Garofalo, Ben Stiller, Tom Waits they all said "wow!" because they couldn't conceive of what that cocktail could produce. And I knew that the script was pretty wild. We hoped those ingredients would make some strange sense and create this weird place called Champion City. And it was fun to do. Kinka Usher, the director probably overnurtured everyone's mad level of invention. I think we shot something like a 19 hour Chinese opera and they cut it down into a short commercial film. There were some very funny minds at work on that set.

CrankyCritic: Where did Casanova Frankenstein's bizarre accent come from?
Geoffrey Rush: It all happened very fast. I was reading this book about Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and I started reading about Carl Laemmle being Bavarian and about how all those films like Frankenstein and Dracula, all the early Universal stuff, were really like Grimm's fairy tales taken out of the dark forests of Europe and put into American B-movie pop culture. The script seemed to echo that. Here you had all these superhero blue collar guys who felt like they were the tail end of some sort of alternative parallel universe millennium America suburbia, and Casanova Frankenstein was locked away in an old Europe that was completely alien to the life that they were leading and that's where the conflict's from. So we sort of settled on German. We tried Transylvanian, but I laughed every time I did it.

CrankyCritic: And the nails?
Geoffrey Rush: That was Claire Forlani's idea. I wanted to create the character as if he were a hermit that had very cunningly used his 20 years to trick the Board of Directors into thinking he was on the path to redemption. It was like Howard Hughes being in that hotel room for so long. Claire said "Do you remember how his nails grew?" It seemed like such a kind of great detail, there was a deceit for the audience. I wanted them to believe the guy was off the wall and gone to seed and that you didn't realize his mind was still demonic and sharp.

CrankyCritic: This is not what audiences expect to see you do.
Geoffrey Rush: It was very refreshing and interesting for me as an actor. Having just done a couple of Tudor films and Les Miserables, I was really looking for something that was going to be playful but not crappy. I didn't want to do something that was not going to mean something to me as an actor. I liked the invented world of this

story and the fact that I couldn't really identify it with something else. It's not Blade Runner meets Mary Poppins. When I saw the art department's work I went, Wow! Visually, this film is sort of ... what drug were they on when they drew that?

CrankyCritic: Do you think about how the public will perceive of you when you take the role?
Geoffrey Rush: As an actor you don't want to think of yourself as a blank slate. You don't know those elements or dimensions of a character. You don't know how you're going to find them or even if you've got them in you. I know there are certain trump cards I've got as an actor, if I want to play a weak vulnerability, I know I'm physically right for that. But when they start talking about a guy who wants to take over the world; if you take a look at what goes on in the mind of somebody that's completely delusional, it's like the ego of a 4 year old.

CrankyCritic: Was it harder to create a character that can be seen to be so close to parody as opposed to a "real" character?
Geoffrey Rush: If you look at any comic book, and in particular the Flaming Carrot comic books (where Mystery Men was created), frame to frame it's extraordinary how dramatic the camera angles of the cartoonist's viewpoint can shift. When shooting with Kinka I'd be looking for the camera and I'd find it on the floor on a crane behind my heel but with a superwide lens that would take in the entire room. I'd think "My God how is he going to drop that into the sequence?" and then you see it on screen and it's the asylum from behind my chair. There's this looming figure in the foreground and all these little people challenging, so those physical and spatial dimensions of cartooning provide some guidelines as to how you have to create the character. You're not looking at some complex layered psychological creation you've got to find somebody that's credible and believable for the moments but lives in a very psychotic and extreme world.

CrankyCritic: So... did you read comics as a kid?
Geoffrey Rush: I wasn't a fanatical comic reader. I was big on Superman.

CrankyCritic: Is there a downside to stepping into the mainstream?
Geoffrey Rush: Mystery Men is mainstream? Yes, I guess it is. If having a great opportunity of playing my first film in America with that gallery of great comic and wonderful eccentrics, if that's the mainstream, give me more of that.

CrankyCritic: Then what do you predict for your future?
Geoffrey Rush: You can never predict. There's a lot of mysterious things about my recent career. I mean I never would have thought that Shine would take me where it took me. I never thought Elizabeth to be quite realistic. I don't think many people did. The naysayers were pretty confident that two films about Tudor life were probably going to end up hitting a brick wall at some point. But it's thrilling to know that they played to great critical success and people were queued round the block.

CrankyCritic: You and Greg Kinnear seemed to have a great rapport
Geoffrey Rush: There's something strange about that, strange as in he came out to promote as Good as it Gets and we hung out a bit with James L. Brooks and a film director that I was working with at the time. I didn't know him from his background here on TV but found him to be constantly deeply amusing. Very funny. And he was like that on set. I thought he was born to play this role because he looked so much like the guy next door in a 50s movie but he also looked curiously right as being a superhero. He was very funny to work with

CrankyCritic:  [working with outrageous comic geniuses]
Geoffrey Rush:  You don't really dissect that at the time. Paul Reubens – I'm a huge Pee Wee fan. I was in awe of being on set with Paul. I found later that he was a little in awe of me because he thought I was this very serious classical actor. He loved it when I suggested for the fart sequence in the back of the limo I said "and maybe my hair should blow like this when you do it..." it became sort of a moment. Great minds were at work on that one. [laughter]

CrankyCritic: If you could have a superpower, what would it be?
Geoffrey Rush: I don't know. I suppose that's the projected fantasy, isn't it? Having amazing strength, because I'm not particularly physically strong. You could hit somebody and send them flying through the side of a building.

CrankyCritic:  Anybody in particular you'd like to bonk?
Geoffrey Rush:  [laughing] No.

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