“The King’s Speech” just picked up the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards on Sunday night, but it might not have happened had it not been for one of its stars, Geoffrey Rush.
“This project started on your doorstep…. It was a play and you said, ‘This should be a movie!’” Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush asked Geoffrey on the red carpet before Sunday’s big event in Hollywood.
“I think sometimes you have those little creative moments,” Geoffrey told Billy of how the film started.
“I’m reading the play thinking, ‘Do I want to do a play in London? That would mean a long time away from my family,’” Geoffrey recounted. “I was intrigued by the historical storyline. I knew all about George VI and the stammer and the abdication [of King Edward VIII]. I had no idea about Lionel Logue, the speech therapist, which is why I think they sent it to me, they wanted to alert me to the fact that this Australian character existed.”
Geoffrey said he read the materials and immediately took action.
“I got on to my agent and said, ‘I imagined this only as a film when I was reading it,’ you know, even though I knew they were presenting it as a play. I said, ‘It’s film,’” he explained
The Best Supporting Actor nominee revealed that once he pushed it as a motion picture, people got on board.
“It’s just seemed to attract the right ingredients at the right rate and it moved forward fairly quickly,” he said. “It suddenly became a film that people would want to go and see a couple of times.”
In addition to taking home the statue for Best Picture, Geoffrey’s co-star, Colin Firth, won the Best Actor trophy, while Tom Hooper won Best Director.
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