"I Was Scared to Death of the Script": 'The Rule of Jenny Pen's Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow on Why They Joined This Twisted Tale (2025)

The Rule of Jenny Pen took audiences by surprise at Fantastic Fest 2024, where filmmaker and co-writer James Ashcroft (Coming Home in the Dark) earned Best Director for his adaptation of Owen Marshall's frightening short story. Unsurprisingly, both legendary leads, Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow, took home Best Actor Awards on the festival circuit shortly before IFC and Shudder acquired the mystery horror.

In the movie, Rush plays Judge Stefan Mortensen, the newest addition to a New Zealand retirement home. A recent stroke has left the judge paralyzed, and his new surroundings leave him feeling out of sorts, bitter, and determined to get out of there as fast as possible. To make matters worse, Mortensen seems to be the only one contending with the seemingly docile Dave Crealy (Lithgow). The staff won't listen, and his fellow residents are too scared to stand up to the dementia doll-wielding Crealy and his sadistic games.

Before the movie's release, the longtime friends and co-stars spoke with Collider's Steve Weintraub about the experience of working with Ashcroft in New Zealand. Before digging into why this "extreme" script appealed to the two of them, they share their journeys from school plays to stageplays, from Shakespeare to Star Wars, and Lithgow opens up about taking on the iconic role of Albus Dumbledore in Max's upcoming Harry Potter series.

John Lithgow Voiced Yoda, and It’s All Thanks to ‘Sesame Street’

“Impatient is he?”

COLLIDER: I have a lot of questions about The Rule of Jenny Pen, but I want to start with some other things first. I am wearing my Stanley Kubrick T-shirt. For both of you, do you have a favorite Stanley Kubrick film?

JOHN LITHGOW: Dr. Strangelove for me.

GEOFFREY RUSH: That's a list that's very hard to pare down to one. Lolita I thought was an extraordinary film.

LITHGOW: He is amazing. Are you a particular fan of Kubrick's, Steven?

I am a huge fan of Kubrick. But the proper answer for the best film is there is none because they're all amazing.

RUSH: That's correct.

LITHGOW: Yeah, they’re all amazing. Like no other filmmaker, you remember the images of a Kubrick film as if you'd seen it just yesterday. I don’t know what his magic is, but it's so fresh and immediate the way he used a camera. It's amazing. I'm not surprised you're a big fan.

There are only a few filmmakers that you can tell when you’re watching, that are just that kind of auteur. I think it's because he didn't overdo it. He was very particular with what he directed.

RUSH: The best shot had to be the cut to the wide shot of the ship on its way to Jupiter, and Keir Dullea knocking on the door and saying, “Open the door, Hal,” and he's this big and the ship is this big. That was mind-blowing.

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John, I found it fascinating that you voiced Yoda on Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back - The Original Radio Drama. Do you remember voicing Yoda?

LITHGOW: Oh, yes. Every detail. I was acting in a play on Broadway directed by John Madden, who very soon became a major film director, who directed, among other people, Geoffrey Rush in Shakespeare in Love. He was directing me in Beyond Therapy on Broadway, but in those days, he was a very successful radio director, and they'd hired him to do The Empire Strikes Back radio production. He had Billy Dee Williams and Anthony Daniels and Mark Hamill, but Frank Oz had chosen not to play Yoda because he was very doctrinaire about only using his voice when he used a puppet—not unlike Dave Crealy, I might add. So John was pissing and moaning over lunch one day during a rehearsal break that he couldn't find a Yoda, and I said, [Yoda imitation] “Oh, impatient is he?” And I got the role like that! I'd been watching Sesame Street with my kids for years, with Grover, Frank Oz, running up to the camera, [Grover imitation] “Now, I am getting closer. Now I am getting further.” That's how I got the role of Yoda in the radio production, and I couldn't thank you more for bringing that up.

RUSH: Please don't go and do any Buckaroo Bonzai impersonations, okay?

LITHGOW: [Laughs] No, don't get me started.

I appreciate you indulging me and demonstrating the voice.

Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow Both Began on Stage

“I was instantly a campus star.”

For both of you, everyone starts somewhere. When did you both realize or think that you could pay your rent by just being an actor?

RUSH: I started acting in plays in grade school. I did comedy sketches. We had a teacher in grade five who would say, “Okay, tomorrow we're going to have the news, the weather, and a commercial. I want you to do the news for three minutes. I want you to do the weather for three minutes. And, Geoffrey, you're going to do the commercial.” I would do a parody of whatever was on, Heinz Meanz Beanz, or something like that. Then, I went into high school. I wasn't a sporty guy at all. I loved getting up into the library on Wednesday afternoons when the Sevens were playing the rugged Australian League. Then, all of the teachers that nurtured us through these plays got married or went off. They're all female. They're all fantastic nurturers of people who wanted to do plays. So we decided when they got transferred or got married or had children or whatever happened to them, we would run the school drama club in our senior years ourselves.

Then that went into a varsity period when I was at university. There was a lot of theatrical activity on campus. Then, I got seen by a director from a newly formed professional state theater company. I did my final exam for an arts degree on a Friday, and on the Monday morning, I was on a wage on a three-year contract. So, it sort of unfurled at a really glorious rate for me. I said then and there, “I hope I'm still putting “actor” on my tax form when I'm 70.”

LITHGOW: I grew up in a theater family. My father produced regional theater, mostly classical Shakespeare festivals in Ohio. I lived in about eight different places because it was very much a gypsy wagon kind of family, moving all over the place with the vicissitudes of his career. I didn't want to be an actor. I was in lots and lots of his plays. I was in 20 Shakespeare plays before I was 20 years old, never in anything approaching a big role. But I was much more interested in being an artist. I was quite a committed painter and printmaker, but I went away to college and fell in with the theater gang by osmosis. I'd become a much more experienced actor than anybody else. I was instantly a campus star, and it was like, “Okay, I'll go with the flow. The handwriting is on the wall.” I've always said, “If you hear enough laughter and applause at a young age, you're going to end up an actor whether you want to be or not.”

RUSH: I would love to have seen your Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Did you do Moth?

LITHGOW: No, I didn't play Moth, but I did play Mustardseed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

RUSH: That's a killer of a role.

LITHGOW: In fact, I did it in two different productions. I played all the one-syllable roles—Pinch, Froth…

LITHGOW: I finally moved up to Guildenstern and Hortensio. Four syllables each.

How Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow Joined This Eerie Horror

“I was scared to death of the script.”

Jumping into why I get to talk to you guys, The Rule of Jenny Pen. I'm sure both of you read a lot of scripts. What was it about this one that said, “Yes, I need to make this?”

RUSH: The scene on page three. The scene on page three just grabbed me. That rarely happens. I think it was because already the detail of how the first scene should play out was forensically detailed with brilliant, evocative descriptions of performance and activity and dialogue, and that just kept happening. Then, on page 10, there'd be another master moment, and the film just kept layering itself deeper and deeper and deeper.

LITHGOW: Geoffrey was persuaded immediately. I was scared to death of the script. It scared me so much. It seemed so extreme. It was only when I got on a Zoom with James Ashcroft, the the co-writer and filmmaker, and he completely sold me on it. He spoke so beautifully about it, and he convinced me of his serious intent. Clearly, he had a great intelligence and a very compassionate heart. He had created this monstrous character of Dave Crealy. He talked about how it's a play about cruelty and bullying, and there haven't been enough films that have really dealt in depth with those issues. As soon as I heard him talk about that, I saw the script in a very, very different way and the character of Dave very differently. And of course, as soon as Geoffrey was involved, I saw this was going to be a wonderful mano a mano experience with a character actor like me. [Laughs]

The reason I wanted to watch it was the two of you, and you both do not disappoint. You guys are fantastic together going against one another. Geoffrey, everyone at the rest home has sort of given up on fighting Dave. What do you think it is about Judge and the character of Judge, where he wants to fight back and is unwilling to back down?

RUSH: That's a very quintessential thought. I often describe that great ensemble of septuagenarian, octogenarian, and nonagenarian New Zealand actors that we worked with… Because my first question to James Ashcroft was, “How are you going to cast this?” Because you're going to have to honor and validate the truth of life in an aged care facility on a very compassionate and humane level. He said, “I'm going to invite all my mentors when I started drama school. All the older actors I worked with when I was 20,” and that's who we had. They were such a bunch. They were fantastic. There were levels of eccentricity. There was one great actress there called Jeanette MacDonald, and I went, “Not the Ginette McDonald?” He said, “No, a Ginette McDonald.” [Laughs] They were great anecdotalists. We would all get together for cocktails at the end of the tougher days. It’s from a generation where, being a theater actor back in the middle of the last century or later, there was a spirit to theatrical camaraderie that had a certain frisson to it. It was great to be around that again.

LITHGOW: And there was James, who really took the setting and the atmosphere of that world very seriously. It's very interesting about James, his wife, in fact, is the chairman/CEO of a chain of senior care facilities in New Zealand. Very fine institutions. She's second generation. Her mother and father created this company, and James really knows that world and really wanted to treat it with great kindness and dignity. Everything about it, about his presentation, is completely accurate to what he knows about the world, including the consultants who worked with us. The physical therapists who deal with Judge Mortensen's character are actual physical therapists. He wanted to create this world and present it. Even though it's the background to a kind of horrific story, an indisputably horrific story, he wanted it to be a story of compassion. He's a compassionate man with a good heart and a wild sense of humor. It was marvelous the way he really knew how to direct a film. He's fairly new to filmmaking, and yet he's already a young master.

RUSH: The thing about the Greek chorus idea is that I knew that John's character is such an effusive powerhouse of malevolence. The duality of deceiving people is very skillful, so some people have just got used to him being some slightly braindead person, as it were, but in fact, he has a very fast, vengeful mind ticking over. Mortensen, as a judge, as a man of law and as a man powerful in society who believes that law is what is holding the place together, I think he reaches a point of doubt in himself because he is neurologically deteriorating, and it's a question of whether he will be able. But I think he has a moral compass and a sense of ethics that he knows this guy needs to be eliminated. It's a quest if you think of it in classical heroic terms of drama. That's the landscape that we're seeing afresh through the metaphor of life in an aged care facility, as it were.

John Lithgow Addresses the ‘Harry Potter’ Controversy

He’s been tapped to play Albus Dumbledore in the HBO series.

John, I do have to ask you an individual question. I’m a big Harry Potter fan, and I know that you’re going to be playing Dumbledore. I have to wonder, I’m assuming you’re gonna do like an English accent? Like how have you, are you already starting to think about how you’re gonna play the role?

LITHGOW: Not a lot, but he’s certainly an Englishman. In fact, there’s a good deal of controversy that an American has been hired to play him. He’s such an icon.

RUSH: Even us from the colonies down south never got a look in. No one was allowed in.

LITHGOW: [Laughs] I’m half-English, you know? I’ve just played Roald Dahl. I’ve played Winston Churchill. I’ll spend some time with a dialect coach. Don’t worry about that. But no, Dumbledore couldn’t possibly be anything other than English. I just have to do my best. The wonderful thing is I was welcomed by every English actor I worked with on The Crown. They had far more confidence in me and my Englishness than I did myself.

I love the idea of you playing the role. I know this is a really big project for Max and HBO. Were you excited to sign on to something that you could be playing for the next 7–10 years? Is it something that’s a little daunting? What goes through your head when you’re signing on to, honestly, a pretty iconic role like this?

LITHGOW: It’s pretty scary, but it’s certainly not anything I would dream of saying no to. Look, I’m about to turn 80 next year. I’ll be 86 or 87 at the wrap party for this one. It’s a wonderful winding down role. That’s how I see it. I know that I’ll be working at the very top of the food chain. These are superb people. I will be working among the best English-speaking actors in the world. The talent pool right there in London is at their disposal. I’m really excited about it and revisiting Harry Potter in depth these days. I just want to do it justice.

Do you know when you start filming? Is it this summer? Have they told you?

LITHGOW: I do Giant, the Roald Dahl play, right up until August 2. I’m available to work on August 4, so I go right out of the frying pan and into the fire. I’ll be doing makeup and hair tests for the last couple of weeks that I perform Roald Dahl in the West End.

Jumping back into why I get to talk to the two of you. I feel like Jenny Pen is a great advertisement for making sure you have kids so they can watch over you in a rest home. True or false?

RUSH: It's a good premise to state that.

LITHGOW: That's true. Neither of us have children. We just have each other. [Laughs]

RUSH: We were aware in New Zealand that the indigenous Māori community are very thoughtful about their elders. They're respected in a great way. I don't know [about] many other cultures. Of what I know of Japan, that's also another culture that's hardwired into family structure. And it is important. When I was a teenager, when I was 14, I had a great grandmother who was still alive, and she was 93. I thought, “That's really ancient.” There weren't many. But since then, for good genes or good diet or whatever, good luck, the greater majority of people are seeing themselves into their last decade of the centenary years.

LITHGOW: Some of the kindest characters in the film are the caregivers in the senior care facility, and a lot of them are New Zealand Māoris, just lovely people. Not to mention George Henare, Geoffrey’s roommate in the film, who is one of the great New Zealand actors.

RUSH: Yeah, the culture surrounds the film in the caretakers. I was lucky enough before we started shooting, I was there early to come to terms with my wheelchair techniques. I just had to more or less get a good driving license and a good skill set up for fast speeds, fast turns. The French Connection part of the movie, I call it, in the second half. I got to go to the Pacific Arts Festival, which celebrates the culture across the Pacific and New Zealand. It was one of the most thrilling awards nights because people would be downstep onto the stage, the winners of of different awards. They were just elevated by music and ritual. People spoke of their 5,000-year-old heritage. Australia is only just to the left. When I was at school, we knew almost zero about an ancient culture that's as old as Egypt. Their oceanic knowledge and geographic discoveries are phenomenal. Long before we read [Thor] Heyerdahl, there was so much going on there on the great complexities of anthropology and sociological thinking.

I'm fascinated by how actors get ready for that first day of filming. For a project like Jenny Pen, in the weeks leading up or the months leading up to that first day of filming, what are you actually doing to mentally get ready to break down the script so when you step on set that first day, you feel very confident in what you're going to deliver to the director?

LITHGOW: We had a wonderful luxury. Geoffrey, who lives in Melbourne on the other side of the world, traveled to Wellington by way of Los Angeles. In other words, he circumnavigated. When he was in LA, the two of us—it was his idea—just sat for two days and worked on the script. We read it through together, with my assistant reading all the stage directions and everybody else's roles, just to have our first bite of the script before we actually got there and started working in earnest. James was in on it. He wasn't watching on Zoom, but we would report to him and give him our responses to our own experience.

Geoffrey and I knew each other from before. We had worked together before we were friends, and we were both equally excited about working on these. We'd both given a lot of thought to the two characters, but we had a first go at it. Meantime, I was doing my teeth. I was doing my eyes. I was already anticipating my dialect coach. I believe I spent some time on Zoom with her, even though I hadn't arrived at the Antipodes yet. There's a lot of thought, and a lot of work goes into that just so that you're ahead of the game by the time you're actually there.

RUSH: I have to embed in it's not a massively dialogue-driven script, but there are some sections that are complicated because of the neurological decay. There are blips. So I had to get my head around, “I’m sitting in a corridor, but when I turn my head, I'm now in the room with the therapist.” So, I wanted to understand the orchestration of the storytelling in as much detail as possible. John did tell me when he was doing 3rd Rock From the Sun, he said, “I got very good at learning fast dialogue quickly.” He had to. We've both done Lear recently, and I spent months in learning preparation for that. Lear’s not the biggest role in the world. You know what I mean? It's 900 lines, I think. But you've got to be on top of that, and I was doing that while I was shooting Pirates of the Caribbean 5, so I'd be walking the Gold Coast beach doing, “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” [Laughs]

LITHGOW: I did get very fast at learning lines during 3rd Rock days when speed was of the essence, but that's gone. It takes a long time now. I have a great, long speech toward the end of the film. I don't think a spoiler alert is required, but I do talk for a long time. I started learning that during the pre-shoot period, and it was a wonderful thing to have. Even though it was a good five weeks before I had to shoot that scene, it was great to have something that I just knew solid, and I could just drill it constantly. It was my way of getting to know Dave, really.

The Rule of Jenny Pen opens in theaters on March 7.

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The Rule of Jenny Pen

Thriller Horror Drama

7 10

Release Date

September 19, 2024

Runtime

103 minutes

Writers

James Ashcroft, Eli Kent

Cast

See All

• 

  Geoffrey Rush

  Uncredited

• 

  John Lithgow

  Tony Garfield

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