I noticed this last week when Captain America came out in theaters. Hugo Weaving has been a part of virtually every major blockbuster franchise in the last two decades. Granted, Hugo does a lot of stage work and has done mostly small films which gets him little publicity but since 1999 he's been taking part in a lot of blockbuster movies.
Starting in 1999, he played Agent Smith in The Matrix and its sequels. His delivery of lines like, “Mister Anderson, we’ve missed you.” is so creepy cool it makes me feel like I just got molested by a very congenial and proper pedophile. I almost want to apologize to him for it.
Then he went on to play Elrond in the Lord of the Rings trilogy as well as reprising the role for both parts of The Hobbit set to come out in 2012.
He's also the voice of Megatron in the Transformers trilogy.
Now, he's The Red Skull in Captain America and possibly The Avengers. Couple that with the fact that he played V in V for Vendetta and you've got the comic book films as well as the summer popcorn flicks. He's like a Geek God. Weaving is basically the Will Smith/Harrison Ford of the 21st century.
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2 comments:
Treating Weaving's independent films and theatre career as an afterthought is just about the gravest insult you could offer. Read any of the actor's in-depth interviews. He considers Hollywood projects an occasional diversion from his primary love, which is playing complex human characters in Australian films. He's not trying to be a "geek god" or grab villain roles in Hollywood franchises-- that's just Hollywood typecasting.
As a former actor, I always said that given the chance, I'd do movies for money and stage for me.
I wasn't trying to cast him as some outsider, clamoring to achieve a geek god-like status or to cast his stage work and smaller films as an afterthought, believe me. In fact, I have read a lot of the stuff he's said about his films. He basically treated Transformers as a paycheck and didn't put any subtext into the performance.... which is probably a good thing considering it was a Michael Bay movie.
My only thought was that it was just so odd that at the center of every huge event film franchise, recently, there stands Hugo Weaving. He adds a lot of gravitas to the production.
If anything, I hope this drives the casual moviegoer to check out his earlier work like The Interview or Proof... just hopefully not Reckless Kelly.
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