Endurance: that's what Geoffrey Rush likes to think he inherited from the ancestors whose stories are told in this week's episode of Who Do You Think You Are.
Rush learned that on both sides of his family there were great, great, great etc grandfathers who battled unfair treatment. On his mother's side, in northern Germany, an ancestor fought a local mafia which was trying to keep him from running the musicians' guild. "I read the letters that he wrote to the king," Rush says. "They were pretty amazing, pretty bold, saying 'I'm really talented and I'm better than these people, I'm born to fulfil this role'."
On his father's side, Rush found a convict sent to Sydney for "diddling a pig jobber" (stealing from a seller of farm animals) who campaigned against being unfairly transferred to the dreaded Port Macquarie. "He ultimately was so tenacious, he was serving his seven-year sentence, and right till the very end he was placing that in jeopardy by wanting to right a wrong, for which he had considerable support. He proved that he was a victim of controlling ruling forces. He was either very smart or a loudmouth Irish ratbag."
Did Geoffrey Rush inherit their fighting spirit? "I don't know if genetically any of that trickles down," he says. "I'm not a full-time activist, because my career thankfully has been relatively bountiful. I haven't had to fight against injustice with the same degree of significance, where it's life or death.
"I kind of admired their sense of endurance. When I started in 1971, I remember thinking 'I hope I'm still doing this when I'm 70, putting my name on a tax form and saying actor'. Over the broader arc of the period of theatrical history that I've lived through in Australia, from the early days of the creation of state theatre companies to now when we have an internationally recognised series of artists, actors, costume designers, cinematographers, etc, maybe that endurance has come somewhere from my stock."
Rush hasn't yet reached 70 (he's 64) but there's every indication he'll still be able to write "Profession – actor" on his tax form six years from now. He was speaking to me from the Whitsundays, where he's playing the archetypal Captain Barbossa in the fourth sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean. "It's a remarkable part of the world – these volcanic rocks stick out of the ocean and it's the perfect location for this pirates film," he says.
Rush describes his role as "central", then apologises for not revealing more: "You know, with the white noise that goes on, blogs and stuff, these days it's really hard to keep a level of excitement about some of the thrills and spills that might be happening in the narrative of a film because by the time it comes out in 2017, they might all be yawning and going 'we've read all that'."
I ask if he's been moved to tears by anything he learned while making Who Do You Think You Are – which is what happened to Richard Roxburgh last year when he found his ancestor had been a slave owner.
"You do feel a kind of pressure – is this the scene where I should have floods of tears?" Rush says. "They shoot about 20 hours over three weeks and they've already, through their paper trail, found the story that they are going to pursue. It's kind of like a genre. Mine became more of a detective mystery thriller, whereas I know some of my colleagues would weep the whole way through because of the hardships and the surprises and the empathy. Mine didn't go down that path. I was more charged up about finding out what happens next.
"When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with a show called The Time Tunnel. It felt a bit like that because you get into the minutiae of actually going to the courthouses and handling documents and letters and records and things in these dark northern climes. It sets your imagination alight trying to envisage the day-to-day realities."
Who Do You Think You Are is on Tuesday at 7.30pm on SBS1.
The surprise twist
Beau Bridges has a big advantage over the other stars of the series Masters of Sex. He actually remembers the year 1966, when the researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson released a book called Human Sexual Response and changed everything. In that year, Bridges was in his early 20s, and romance was very much on his mind.
"It really revolutionised how all of us think about sex, and it certainly got my attention," he recalls. "Back in those days, the prevailing thought was that women were people to look up to and respect and treasure, very fragile, and you had to open doors for them and jump up when they came into a room. In the sexual world, women were not aggressive, just kind of along for the ride. Then Masters comes out with his book, after all his experimentation, and he says: Wake up people, the ladies are driving the bus!"
The series, very loosely based on the private lives of the researchers, resumes this week on SBS. Bridges plays Barton Scully, provost of the university where Masters works. When he was first hired, Bridges thought his role was to be shocked by the kind of research Masters and Johnson were doing. Later he learned there was a bit more to Scully.
"We made the pilot and it was picked up for a whole season and I was very excited," he says. "I thought 'Oh great, I'll get to do more of this'. I could tell from the pilot that all this sexual stuff was going to be going on behind the scenes with all the characters. My wife and I went to a Christmas party to celebrate the pick-up of the show, and the show's creator says to me, 'It's going to be so much fun, we have a great twist for your character.' My wife told me later she could see where my mind was going, that the provost of the university was going to be getting it on with all these cheerleaders and stuff. So I said 'What's the twist? What's the twist?' and the producer said 'You're gay'. I said, 'Oh'. My wife found it hysterical because my balloon had been popped."
Bridges had never played a gay man before, although he had played a transgender man on stage and in a guest role in the series The Closer. He took to it with relish.
"As an actor, every time I've tried to get into new shoes that isn't part of my own life experience, you'd think you'd get used to it, doing it for so many years, but it's always exciting and always a challenge. In the end, what a great experience this has been because I get to represent a closeted gay man in the '50s and '60s. I feel a real responsibility to represent that and hold a light up to that."
Did Bridges play the character any differently once he knew Scully was gay? "Not really, because love is love. For me, whether I'm playing a heterosexual or a homosexual person, the thing that is true is that it's love that defines people. That's what I can relate to, even though I'm not a gay man. I know what love feels like and what it feels like to care for a person and hold a person and be close."
When Human Sexual Response was published, Bridges recalls, nobody spoke about homosexuality. Masters and Johnson began the process of opening society's mind.
"I'm sure I had a number of gay friends, and I wasn't even aware that they were gay," Bridges says. "It must have been a real rough journey. Those were the days when police would break into gay bars and arrest people, throw them in jail. It was considered like a disease, a form of insanity. To be an intelligent, gifted man, who was in a position of great importance in his community, to be so afraid of being who he really was, it was just tragic. Barton Scully probably would have lost his job. The poor guy tries electric-shock therapy to treat himself. He can't be who he wants to be, it's just too dangerous.
"In this season, you see Barton dealing with these secrets that he's got and you see him getting freed up a bit and learning to live his life in a much more forward-facing and more honest way."
What Bridges enjoys about Masters of Sex is that so much of it can be played as comedy. "The humour comes out of the situation in that show – there's no jokes, really," he says. "Michael Sheen [who plays Masters] has that real kind of sombre Welsh thing going on, which I find hysterical.
"One time Michael and I were watching these rabbits screw each other, and the rabbits wouldn't co-operate when they wanted them to go for it. I don't know if you've ever seen a rabbit doing it, but it's the fastest thing on earth – boom, boom, boom, boom. They wouldn't stand still for the camera. So they got a stuffed bunny on a pole, and there's this guy crouched underneath the set that's bopping this rabbit on a pole up and down and then the real rabbit jumped on it. It was just nuts. The whole time Michael just maintained his stone face. I could not hold it together, I had to walk out."
Masters of Sex starts on Thursday at 9.30pm on SBS1.
Three-dimensional roles only for Raine
Fans of Call The Midwife have been wondering what happened to Jessica Raine, ever since she broke their hearts by leaving the series in 2014, supposedly to "pursue a career in films in the US". They were not mollified by her brief turn earlier this year as a distraught mother in Fortitude. Now Raine has turned up in a hit British series called Partners in Crime, despite previously expressing her disdain for crime shows because they so often rely on violence against women.
Actually "crime" in this case means only Agatha Christie. Australians have enjoyed endless TV iterations of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, but we're less familiar with Christie's other detective heroes Tommy and Tuppence (Thomas and Prudence Beresford). In the series Tommy is played by Little Britain's David Walliams, who is also executive producer. Walliams has moved the characters from the early 1920s of the Christie stories to the early 1950s (which still allows references to "the war").
Raine tells Radio Times she took the role because Tuppence is a heroine "who hasn't had to overcome horrific sexual abuse to get there".
"It's become a top priority for me to try only to accept parts where the woman is three-dimensional," Raine says. "It's easy to talk about 'strong female characters', but it's not about being strong, it's about being real, and with Tuppence, it was about being someone who is confident, front-footed, nosey and witty. She's a clever, resourceful woman who's always pushing, and I found that really rubbed off on me.
"There's an element of cosy, for sure, but there's also a lot of full-on action – I get to have a fist fight and throw another woman over a balcony, and it's not cartoony stuff. We take the danger seriously."
Sounds like Britain's answer to Phryne Fisher.
Partners in Crime will air on ABC in October.
