Hugo Weaving on Love Me, getting called Gramps, and why he’s sick of Marvel movies

He’s been in some of the biggest movie franchises ever made but Hugo Weaving reveals why he’d rather tell Australian stories.

Hugo Weaving says he has absolutely no interest in returning to the roles that made him a global star.

The Aussie actor has been a part of some of the biggest movie franchises ever made, from The Matrix to Transformers, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe to The Lord of the Rings – and now has tapped out of all them.

He opted to do a play (wisely in retrospect) rather than return as the smarmy, sneering Agent Smith in the hot mess that was The Matrix Resurrections.

He farewelled voicing the villainous Decepticon leader Megatron after three Transformers films, admitting he hadn’t seen any of them and really didn’t have a clue what was going on.

Hugo Weaving played the Red Skull in Captain America: The First Avenger, but he says he’s sick of Marvel movies.

His role as Captain America’s nemesis, The Red Skull, was recast for Avengers: Endgame because the contract wrangling got too hard and he wasn’t really that keen anyway.

And now with the news that Warner Bros is considering making more movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved books – potentially with original LOTR director Peter Jackson on board – the chances of getting Weaving to don the pointy ears to play venerable half-elven warrior king Elrond again are slim to none.

“I’m very fond of Peter – I think he’s an amazing man – but personally, I’ve had enough of Lord of the Rings,” he says over Zoom call from London, where he is filming the fourth season of the acclaimed Apple TV+ spy drama Slow Horses.

Hugo Weaving and Peter Jackson on the set of The Hobbit – The Battle of the Five Armies. The Australian actor has no plans to return to the Tolkein world.

“I didn’t see the latest TV series. Maybe there’s a million stories in The Silmarillion – I think there probably are – but it feels like it’s just another financial imperative to keep on. Like, Marvel has a universe and they’ll keep mining it until people get sick of it. I’m sick of it already.”

The AACTA-winning NIDA graduate, who made his television debut in Bodyline nearly 40 years ago and has deftly balanced a busy stage career and Aussie indie films with working on blockbusters alongside visionaries such as Jackson and the Wachowskis, says “the big films have never really interested me because they’re big”.

Even his last studio film, the 2017, $150 million megaflop Mortal Engines, was full of potential he thought, based as it was on a series of young adult books.

“I thought it had the possibility of being a franchise like Harry Potter,” he says with a sigh. “It just became a big, unwieldy mess.”

Hugo Weaving as Thaddeus Valentine in Mortal Engines.

Despite his current sojourn to the UK for Slow Horses – “they’re a very well-oiled machine, very successful, lovely people” – Weaving prefers to focus his talents on Australian stories and lend his clout to getting them made.

He welcomes the promises of greater investment in the arts made by the federal government, particularly after the chaos wrought on the sector by the Covid shutdowns.

“It’s critical for us as a country to celebrate our own culture, otherwise, I don’t know who we are if we don’t do that,” he says.

“So I think that’s a really great thing. From that perspective, having this present government in is a big boost to film and television, and the arts in general.”

It was a particular joy, he says, to be able to get back to work on the second season of the acclaimed, Melbourne-shot BINGE drama Love Me.

For the first season, producers had to get special dispensation from the Victorian government to be able to shoot during the pandemic and the strict restrictions forged a strong bond between the cast, which also includes Heather Mitchell, Bojana Novakovic, Bob Morley, William Lodder and Celia Pacquola.

Hugo Weaving and Heather Mitchell in a scene from Season 2 of Love Me on BINGE.

“We all stayed in the same hotel, all the actors, so we formed a bit of a bubble and socialised together in and went to work together,” he says.

“So we became pretty close and it was lovely to get back with everyone.”

Weaving says he also enjoyed slipping back into the woollen vest of his Love Me character Glen, a set-in-his-ways, 60-something, father of two who unexpectedly finds new love and something of a sexual awakening after his wife of many years dies.

His long-time friend Mitchell – the pair worked together on Bodyline in 1984 – plays his free-spirited new lover Anita, and the pair raised some eyebrows during the first season with some racy sex scenes together.

Heather Mitchell and Hugo Weaving in Bodyline.

Hugo Weaving in Love Me..

“That seemed to be something that people really responded well to,” Weaving says of the show’s embracing of older characters still being sexual beings.

“The fact that we don’t see it on our screens much, doesn’t mean it’s not there – we’re just not very good at telling those stories. There’s nothing about an older couple falling in love and having sex that is in any way weird or unusual. It’s just that we don’t talk about it much.”

Weaving says that if the first season of Love Me was about “grief and love”, then the second season is about “complications and new life”.

Glen becomes a grandfather for the first time early in the season, and while Weaving’s two children with his long-time partner Katrina Greenwood – actor Harry and artist Holly – haven’t reached that stage yet, he’s excited by the possibility.

Hugo Weaving and wife Katrina Greenwood. Picture: Wentworth Courier

“I totally love children,” he says.

“I love kids. I love playing with my kids and I will undoubtedly love playing with my grandchildren. I love playing with animals. I love playing. It’s easy for me to enjoy little children and watching them grow up and ask questions and I find that utterly delightful. I am quite childlike myself.”

That said, he’s not entirely sure of what he’d like to be called.

“Whatever they want to call me,” he says, with a laugh.

“They probably won’t be able to say Hugo and so there’ll be some weird diminutive of that. If they want to call me Gramps … Grandpa, Gramps., Pop … actually, I don’t like any of them, really. But look, it’s not up to me. It’s up to them.”

Weaving says that despite – or maybe because of – his absence from the blockbuster world, he’s as in love with film as he ever was.

He laments that the rise of streaming services means that it’s harder for the smaller, homegrown, indie films he gravitates towards these days to be seen in cinemas, but takes solace in the fact that audiences still flock to film festivals around the country.

“Film is the thing that made me be an actor,” he says.

“My love of cinema was the thing that really thrills me, so I hope we’re not living at the death of cinema. I don’t think we are. Film is being made, it’s just the way we watch them is very different. And I hope that we’ll still be able to go and see them with audiences.”

He has two such projects in the pipeline: mystery drama The Rooster, directed by his long-time friend Mark Leonard Winter, and the outback thriller The Royal Hotel, inspired by the 2017 observational drama Hotel Coolgardie and starring Ozark’s Julia Garner.

“The Royal Hotel is about masculine drinking culture and the effect that has on these two American backpackers who want to get a job and they get sent out to the middle of nowhere to this pub. (My character) Billy is both the publican and an alcoholic, so he’s got a few issues.

“Wake In Fright was definitely one of the template films we all referenced and talked about, and it feels very much as if it’s in that territory in the sense that it touches on thriller, suspense and almost touches on a horror genre. It’s a dystopian view of Australia.”

Love Me, Season 2, streams on BINGE from April 6

Originally published as Hugo Weaving on Love Me, getting called Gramps, and why he’s sick of Marvel movies