He's part scientist, part Groucho Marx: Geoffrey Rush on playing Einstein

The veteran actor takes his seat at the end of a long, musty room in a Prague film studio. His wild hair dances with static as he removes his jacket. Slightly hunched, he scans the room with narrowed eyes and greets the journalists in his distinctive croak.

At 66 that croak, like crunching gravel resonating with warmth, has rattled in a long and fertile acting career. Geoffrey Rush has received critical praise and multiple awards. He has been undead pirate captain Hector Barbossa; Lionel Logue, the speech therapist to King George; David Helfgott, the grown-up child prodigy pianist struggling with mental illness in Shine, a performance that won the actor an Oscar.

This time, his is the voice of Albert Einstein in his senior years, in National Geographic channel's first TV drama series, Genius.

How do you convey genius on screen in a way that people can understand?

I don't ever try put on a genius face, where everybody goes, "He's so fucking bright". But there's something about his look. What really fascinated me when I first started doing private study on it was that there weren't many people in that era that had his hair. In Germany in post World War1 most people had short hair. He did have a kind of anti-conservative streak and anti-authoritarian streak.

What is your process in internalising the character for the screen?

Panel-beating the dialogue into my brain so that I look as if I know what I am talking about.

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What would your school teacher say about you portraying Albert Einstein?

He would laugh. But I had aspirations to be an astronomer. My childhood and teenage years were during the era of the American space race, so I was always fascinated by that. I gave lectures in Grade 7 about the solar system. When I spoke to a guidance counsellor they said I would have to do applied maths and physics, which I did in my senior years. But I got very poor grades and switched to a drama arts degree in university.

But I still read New Scientist and I try keep up with quantum mechanics and cosmological outreach, and black holes and dark matter, and the Large Hadron Collider.

Talk about Einstein's sense of humor?

Fortunately they gave me a great study package of available footage. I thought there was as much Groucho Marx in him as there was scientist. There's some footage of him in some big congress situation, and there's all these politico bureaucratic types and he seems more interested in the NBC microphone.

Has playing Einstein changed your perception of genius?

I did some research and looked into that and found a fantastic Schopenhauer quote: "Talent hits a target that no one can hit. Genius hits a target that no one can see." That is brilliant. But it is a bit of a relief according to the script that you can see the human dimensions and contradictions that are within him.

Einstein is a genius in the area of science. Who would be a genius in acting?

I don't know if you can apply it to the performing arts, because it is such an intangible outcome. I don't think anyone that has won an Oscar has done anything quite like discovering DNA or dark matter.

But there's an Australian comedian, Barry Humphries, who plays Dame Edna. I think he's borderline genius in terms of what he saw that no one else saw. He started in 1956, and he's still active with the same character. And in 1956 he satirised suburban life in Melbourne, and it was unique. There's a kind of genius in that. And also he has other things he does. He's a cognoscenti of very obscure European art movements of the early 20th century in the same way that Einstein played the violin and loved Mozart. A lot of geniuses have those other kinds of sidebars going on.

WATCH the trailer for Nat Geo's Genius