Geoffrey Rush: 'Pirates is a monster'

Geoffrey Rush "felt pressure" not to mess up on 'Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides'.

The Australian actor – who plays Captain Hector Barbarossa in the comedy action movie alongside Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow – knew the film was a "monster" when he saw the lengths the crew had to go to shoot a scene, and he was nervous about making mistakes more than he would be on a smaller film.

He said: "To shoot that one short scene we went 30 miles out to sea to a sandbar that was only visible eight hours a day. There they grappled together three oil tankers to use as a production base. When I saw that, I suddenly realised what a monster this had become.

"For six actors to have a dialogue on a beach meant there were 800 people to provide lunch for, stunt men, people to rake the sand between takes and so on. So yes, at that point we did feel a pressure not to screw up."

The 59-year-old star is most recently known for the role of speech therapist Lionel Logue in 'The King's Speech – a part for which he was nominated for an Oscar – and he reveals he did not initially think the project, about Britain's stuttering King George VI, would be a good one to work on.

He said: "My primal response was that this would be tricky to film and would probably have no viable commercial life but that it was a fantastic story: two men and their relationship which grows out of a class divide between royalty and commoners and a cultural divide between Australia and England.”