Hugo Weaving releases new film Hearts and Bones after making movie in bath with Sam Neill
Australian actor Hugo Weaving has quietly turned 60 while in lockdown. But it hasn’t stopped him from releasing his new film online — and from making a movie in the bath with Sam Neill.
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Hugo Weaving’s 60th birthday celebration didn’t go exactly to plan last month.
The Aussie actor, best known for his roles in hits including the Lord Of the Rings and Hobbit films, the Matrix trilogy and Captain America: the First Avenger, had planned to mark the milestone with a big bash with his castmates in London, where had been performing in a play.
But the rapid shutdown of the British capital almost overnight due to coronavirus meant the run was cut short and he had to hotfoot it back to Australia while he still could.
“Literally, the whole thing changed over a weekend – the government over there went from herd immunity to lockdown very quickly,” he says. “So as soon as we shut down I made the call to get out of there as soon as I could so I left within a day and a half.”
Instead he spent the big day in insolation with long-time partner Katrina Greenwood and their daughter Holly, drinking pomegranate martinis on the porch of his rural retreat in Dungog, which suited the actor just fine.
“I generally run away from my birthdays,” he says. “I like other people’s birthday parties but I don’t really love being the centre of attention.”
If hitting the big 6-0 was cause for any kind of reflection, Weaving can look back on an astonishingly diverse career. In addition to the blockbusters that have gained him fans around the world, he’s been an integral part – and powerful advocate for – the Australian film, TV and stage industry, ever since his breakout role as Douglas Jardine in 1984’s Bodyline. Having knocked back a role in the coming fourth Matrix film to do the play in London, nowadays he’s more likely to be treading the boards in Sydney or seeking out more satisfying roles in smaller budget, homegrown films such as Hearts and Bones, which was released digitally this week.
In it, he plays Dan Fisher, a war photographer wrestling with post-traumatic stress disorder and the physical effects of years of percussive injuries in the field, thrown further into turmoil when he returns from an assignment to discover his partner is pregnant. He meets a South Sudanese refugee who is also struggling with a traumatic and war-torn past, and the two strike up an unlikely friendship.
“It’s a suburban story but actually dealing with immigration, multiculturalism, how our community works, how it works best when we are inclusive and respectful of each other, but at the same time there is nothing sentimental about it,” Weaving says. “I thought it was a wonderful, complex, domestic, familial, suburban setting for a really serious story about human trauma.”
Weaving was already a photography enthusiast – “I have more books on photography than any other kind of book” – and threw himself enthusiastically into research for the part, seeking out interviews and articles and the works of greats in the field such as award-winning American photojournalists Ron Haviv and James Nachtwe. He came away with a new-found appreciation of the power of their work and the physical and emotional cost that can come with it.
“The greatest photojournalists are not only great at getting to where the image is and being literally at the front of something and often putting their lives in danger but they are also great artists as well,” he says. “I think the great photojournalists capture something in the most extraordinarily poignant way in an unforgettable image that’s sort of seared into your brain and can actually change the world of politics. If you think about some of the great photos from the Vietnam War – the young girl running down the road or the South Vietnamese colonel shooting the man in the street with the gun to the head. Those images are so terrifying that they really bring those things home to people in ordinary homes all around the world.”
He was also sensitive to the mental health aspect of the story. While clearly on a different level to the PTSD of his character in Hearts and Bones, Weaving says he also deals with anxiety and depression and agrees with the assessment recently made by his friends and colleagues Sam Neill and Bryan Brown that actors are particularly prone to mental health issues. The very nature of the profession for most – short bursts of intense, emotional activity and uncertain periods waiting for job offers – mean that the highs and the lows are more keenly felt.
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“Acting is the most brilliant way of understanding who we are and it gets into your whole psyche – your body, your bones and emotionally you get a fantastic workout,” he says. “But then there are times when there is no work at all and consequently the feeling that ‘I’m no good, no one wants me’, the things we all feel, just get exacerbated.”
Like many Australians right now, Weaving is uncertain of his professional future. His next gig was due to be a play for the Sydney Theatre Company in September, but the current social distancing rules have put that in doubt for now.
In the meantime, he’s perfectly happy with his downtime, reading and showing old movies on his projector, not to mention the tantalising prospect of more ridiculous short films on his good mate Neill’s social media feed. Weaving, who generally shuns Twitter and Facebook, embraced the chance to appear in Das Bad, the Kiwi actor’s hilariously off-kilter skit that featured the two of them in the bath.
“The idea of doing something was Sam’s idea and he said ‘I have got this great idea where I am in bed and I wake up and you are sitting on the end of the bed’,” says Weaving with a laugh. “And I went ‘oh yeah, what about if we were in the bath together? And then we have breakfast together? And then we’re outside listening to the birds together?’. Whether we do those, I don’t know, but we ended up doing the bath one first.”
Hearts and Bones is out now on digital release through iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, Sony PlayStation, Telstra and Fetch TV.
Originally published as Hugo Weaving releases new film Hearts and Bones after making movie in bath with Sam Neill