Geoffrey Rush sent a female co-star a winking emoji text, court told

Geoffrey Rush sent a young female co-star a text with a winking emoji, the Federal Court in Sydney has been told.

Australian actor Geoffrey Rush (right) arrives at the Federal Court in Sydney, Tuesday, October 23, 2018. Rush is suing Nationwide News for defamation. (AAP Image/Brendan Esposito) NO ARCHIVING

Actor Geoffrey Rush sent a younger, female co-star a text featuring a winking emoji with its “tongue out”, the sign-off “Gregarious Raunch” and the words that he thought of her “more than is socially appropriate”, the Federal Court in Sydney heard yesterday.

But the Academy Award winner denied the text indicated he was attracted to the actress, Eryn Jean Norvill, the woman at the centre of a defamation case Rush has brought against Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph.

While under cross-examination, Rush likened the inclusion of the emoji :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: in the text, sent six months after he and Ms Norvill appeared in a Sydney Theatre Company King Lear production together, to a Groucho Marx joke. “If there’d been a Groucho emoji, I would have punctuated with that,’’ he said.

He said the winking emoji “was the looniest emoji I could find. If Fozzie Bear had been there, I would have used Fozzie bear. I am a great emoji user.’’

The Hollywood star is suing the Telegraph and journalist Jonathon Moran after the newspaper published allegations he behaved inappropriately towards Norvill in the 2015-16 King Lear production. Rush said he was falsely painted as a “pervert” and “sexual predator”.

According to a defence document, Norvill alleges Rush touched her breast and lower back and made “groping gestures” near her torso when they worked on King Lear. When these allegations were put to him in court, Rush emphatically denied any wrongdoing.

When Tom Blackburn SC, lawyer for the Telegraph, stated that Rush was thinking of Norvill “more than was appropriate”, Rush replied: “I don’t agree.’’

Rush said yesterday he first heard a rumour a complaint had been made to the STC about him, from his wife, actress Jane Menelaus, in March 2017. This was nine months before the Telegraph articles were published.

He noted that the theatre’s “bush telegraph” was “faster than the National Broadband Network”, but that he and his wife could only speculate what the complaint was about.

Mr Blackburn produced an email in which Damian Trewhella, the head of the awards body, the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts, summarised a conversation he had with Rush on November 10, 2017 — 20 days before the Telegraph published its articles.

In the email, Trewhella said Rush told him the STC complaint could be related to alleged “discomfort” in the King Lear carry scene (in which he carried Norvill’s lifeless body across the stage).

This email suggests Rush may have known the nature of Norvill’s complaint almost three weeks before the articles appeared. Rush said on Monday he felt “ambushed’’ by the articles.

Mr Blackburn asked Rush: “You were conscious you had caused some discomfort to Ms Norvill?’’

Rush replied: “These were all speculative analyses … we (he and his wife) were trying to narrow it down and hit brick walls.’’

He added that throughout the production “I felt as though we (Norvill and him) had a very good professional rapport.’’

Earlier yesterday, Rush became tearful as he recalled how he visualised his daughter being hit by a bus and dying near his home in Camberwell, Melbourne, in order to prepare for the scene in which King Lear grieves over his daughter Cordelia’s corpse.

Some of Norvill’s allegations relate to that scene.

“Every night I would reinvent that scene (his daughter’s imagined death) in my mind,’’ he said.

Rush said on Monday he had endured “the worst 11 months of my life’’ since the Telegraph published its articles about him.

The trial continues.