Geoffrey Rush has hinted that he won’t appear in any future Pirates Of The Caribbean movies.
The Australian actor has played Captain Hector Barbossa for 14 years, most recently appearing in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, which topped the box office on its opening weekend.
***SPOILERS AHEAD***
However, Rush has now indicated that Barbossa’s demise in the latest installment means a natural end for the character.
“I did say to (producer) Jerry Bruckheimer, ‘I think this is the end for Barbossa,'” Rush explained to website TooFab. “(His death) expanded the world dramatically of the genre of a tentpole blockbuster, to lose an important character is kind of good. It all made sense and didn’t feel like an easy dramatic device.”
In the latest film, Barbossa, who has become a very wealthy pirate lord who commands a whole fleet of ships, sacrifices himself for his daughter Carina. While the movie franchise has made a habit of bringing characters back from the dead, on this occasion Rush is certain it won’t happen.
“I think the notion of the selfless sacrifice, you’d cheapen that if you suddenly went, ‘Well, we’ll bring him back because we had the scorecards filled out and everyone said they liked Barbossa,” he said.
But Bruckheimer is having none of it, and he doesn’t rule out bringing back the popular character in any possible reboots.
“You never know with us. We can always bring characters back when we love them and we love him,” the veteran filmmaker smiled, with Rush conceding that where there’s a will in Hollywood, there’s a way.
“They could come up with something. Or he could come back like Hamlet’s father as a ghost and just annoy Jack with wisdom,” he joked.
Rush, 65, originally portrayed Captain Barbossa in 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the first installment of the swashbuckling movie series.
