On why we're lucky Elizabeth: The Golden Age didn't call for him to ride a horse.

I've been doing this job a while now, so it's not often that I get nervous before an interview; I got over the whole 'celebrities are just people' thing a long time ago. But nonetheless, I find myself a little amped up as my interview with Elizabeth: The Golden Age's Geoffrey Rush approaches.

Rush--like his Golden Age counterpart Cate Blanchett--is one of those actors that absolutely deserves all the accolades he gets. Since he broke out with his oscar-winning role in 1997's Shine, Rush has worked in film consistently and to much acclaim, including his role as Sir Francis Walsingham in 1998's Elizabeth. This weekend, he'll be reprising his role as Queen Elizabeth's advisor in its sequel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

"I got a lot of extraordinary feedback on that first film from women--a very diverse group of responses," Rush tells me. "I think a lot of women really loved the kind of obsessive loyalty, devotion, mentoring, guidance, openness, flexibility in that non-sexual relationship, but in this kind of business arrangement, this political arrangement of how someone with his kind of philosophies, political acumen, his spiritual guidance was giving this unashamedly to this young, raw woman."

I tell him I felt that Walsingham seemed so much more ruthless in the first movie than he does in Golden Age, Rush explains how they handled the transition. "By the end of [Elizabeth], he's almost reached his use by date," he continues. "You feel as though he's no longer a valid character within her story, but of course he was the man behind the throne for all of her career."

"So we started to look at what has happened to him in the interim. [Director] Shekhar [Kapur] was really intrigued by what happens when a man of such unshakeable resolve gets caught up in his own betrayal and has self-doubt about what he's really doing," Rush explains. "It's almost like they start to nag each other. They've settled into a very long term marriage and the honeymoon period of, 'Honey I think you should go in this direction,' has reach its finality. To the point, I love the little touches like the fact that she slaps me around the head and dresses me down because she now knows what she wants."

Rush has nothing but praise for co-star Cate Blanchett, as well. "Knowing how those scenes are shot--because they're all out of sequence and they're all in different locations and everything--the first thing I thought when I saw the film a month ago in Melbourne was how finely calibrated Cate makes the subtlety of the trajectory of that journey," he tells me. "Whatever's happened between Walsingham's political advice, mentoring, spiritual guidance in the first film, x years down the track she's become the Whitehall icon. And the camera slowly, and Walter Raleigh, kind of slowly pulls away those layers and you get to look inside the woman."

Talking to Rush is as nice as I'd hoped. He is the consummate thespian--deep voice, posture and tone so relaxed you'd swear he was doing yoga and smoking cigarettes all day, and telling me stories as rich and free-flowing as the gestures he uses to punctuate them.

During the press conference earlier, Rush had commented that he won't ride horses in movies. "I don't do equine," I believe is how he phrased it. This comment is particularly unusual given the fact that he does so many period pieces. So I ask him. Why not?

"I rode in Les Miserables and I rode in an Australian film. I was in my mid-40s then," he replies. "My grandparents had a property and probably one of my earliest memories of childhood, of being about three or four and being placed on top of a horse and just freaking, screaming."

Being a former budding psychologist, I can't resist. "How Freudian," I say. Rush responds to my comment with a gale of laughter. "Well, let's not turn it into a therapy session," he replies coyly. And then, "I don't drive, either," he says.

I cannot contain my surprise.

"Well, I find that I can walk," he tells me. "When I was at university in Brisbane and around the age that all my friends were getting cars and stuff, I used to catch trains or you could hitch. And you lived in poverty and you're on a grant and you lived in cheap rent and all that sort of stuff. And then I went to Europe for three or four years, and I was in my late twenties by the time I came back from my studies there. I was a working theater actor--I didn't have a banking account or anything, I had survived. I thought seriously of getting a kind of Roy Lichtenstein kind of T-shirt that said, 'I forgot to drive a car.'"

Rush says that he did take driving lessons a few years ago, but his work schedule keeps him too busy to have enough time together to get his training hours done. "I never found that follow-through period of eight or nine or ten weeks to try and get my 120 hours up. And I suddenly thought, I've really left this too late. Because I think you have to have an early twentysomething brain to deal with what comes at you in traffic. And I thought, 'Iin my next lifetime I'll try.'"

Luckily he's acting in this lifetime.

Geoffrey Rush can be seen in Elizabeth: The Golden Age starting this weekend.

Click on ReelzChannel.com's Elizabeth: The Golden Age page for clips from the movie and more!