Rush, Geoffrey

“If you sit at home, you are not sharing your own private experience of what the general pulse of the world is,” said the actor, who stars in the horror film “The Rule of Jenny Pen.”Geoffrey Rush has rarely met a physical task he didn’t want to attempt, be it sword fighting for “Pirates of the Caribbean” or playing the piano for his Oscar-winning role in “Shine.”The new horror movie “The Rule of Jenny Pen,” starring Rush as a supercilious former judge living in a nursing home, required yet another unfamiliar skill set: He had to use a motorized wheelchair.“I got very good at getting up to speed, but in narrow corridors, it was not the same story,” Rush, 73, said of the feature directed by James Ashcroft and also starring John Lithgow as a psychopathic fellow resident. A lot of the final day’s goof reel “was punctuated by me running into staircases or James leaping over furniture because I went, ‘It’s just not responding.’”In a video call from his native Australia, Rush discussed his cultural essentials, many of them — to his surprise — from his childhood and early professional life. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The TreniersThey were the first band to use the words “rock” and “roll” in lyrics, way back in the late ’40s and early ’50s, when they were a blues band hovering between swing and boogie-woogie. Their energy was definitely sexy and audacious. They beat Bill Haley by about a half decade. My mum was a great jiver during my childhood, and she loved Little Richard. She used to dive onto the dance floor.Silent Film ClownsBob Monkhouse, who was an English comedian, had a show that I used to watch every Saturday night called “Mad Movies.” I got introduced to silent film and not necessarily the big guns. He looked at a lot of the minor characters, and I became obsessed by that.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More