How Hugo Weaving went from grieving to playing the clown on Love Me

For Hugo Weaving, the family drama Love Me belongs to an honourable tradition. “The series is quite Chekhovian in a way,” he observes. “It’s about internal states, not incidents. Not a lot happens in Chekhov: people find love, maybe fall in love with the wrong person, worry about their lives. It’s mostly about people wanting to love and people feeling, and that’s it. And it’s really lovely.”

However, there are no secluded dachas or cherry orchards, as this series proudly showcases glittering city skylines, stylish laneways and choice suburban pockets of Melbourne. “We want it to feel like a contemporary city story and to look like it could be any beautiful international city,” explains Binge’s executive producer Alison Hurbert-Burns.

Hugo Weaving says his character Glen is “unexpectedly amusing and unexpectedly troubled by certain things”.Credit: Ben King

An adaptation of the Swedish series Alska Mig, the award-winning 2021 first season of Love Me introduced viewers to the Mathieson family as they grappled with love and grief. Weaving’s character, Glen, began as a solicitous husband to an angrily ailing Christine (Sarah Peirse). Widowed early in the first episode, the probate solicitor was soon surprising himself and shocking his adult children, Clara and Aaron (Bojana Novakovic and William Lodder), by falling quickly and passionately in love.

By the end of the season, he’d married artist Anita (Heather Mitchell) in a joyful backyard ceremony and found that he could surrender his commitment to a traditional wedding cake without significant repercussions. Life with her was already guiding Glen into unchartered territory, with all the excitement and trepidation that accompanies such change. Anita, we discover in the soon-to-debut second season, feels no need for house insurance, a decision that horrifies her new husband.

Weaving says that he had to think through some knotty emotional tangles in order to bring Glen to a credible screen life. “He’s got to grieve, genuinely grieve, the death of his wife. But then, within two episodes, he’s not only declaring great love for someone, but saying, ‘Will you marry me?’ I wondered how I could honestly make that work and I thought that you’d have to believe that maybe Glen’s never really been in love.

“He’s a nice man, a conservative man, and he married and was dutiful in caring for his wife. He felt for her and wanted to help her, but he was also angry and embittered. There’s a sense in which her death brought grief and possibly liberation. Then he meets someone who’s genuinely lovely and falls in love with her. If we think he’s never really fallen in love before, then that’s really interesting. Then his journey, through however many seasons we do, is towards liberation, but only incrementally because he is being held back by his own nature. So you’ve got a great conflict in the character.”

Weaving and Heather Mitchell in Love Me.Credit: Binge

Perhaps surprisingly, given Glen’s default conservatism, Weaving says, “I think he’s a clown. I don’t mean a red-nose, baggy-pants clown, but any clown figure is blinkered in some way: they can’t see certain aspects of themselves, or they’re obsessive about something. Glen’s quite obsessive about being organised; he doesn’t want things to get out of hand. But he’s in love with someone who’s a free spirit and a bit of a chaotic agent. He’s excited by her and he’s propelled into areas that he’s not naturally comfortable with. That’s both an interesting internal conflict and a place to breathe in some humour.

“I don’t want to play this for humour, but there are situations that Glen gets put into that can be very sweet because he’s reluctant to be free, but actually that’s what he wants more than anything. You wouldn’t normally think about a beta-male, a conservative man, as a clown. But that’s what I like about Glen, that he’s unexpectedly amusing and unexpectedly troubled by certain things and wants to be free of that.”

Glen is negotiating his new life while dealing with the pain of its previous chapter vividly as the ghost of Christine appears to him in milestone moments. He’s also dealing with changes to his family, developments that enable the drama to continue its multi-generational focus on love and pain and the whole damn thing.

Bob Morley, Bojana Novakovic, William Lodder, Heather Mitchell and Hugo Weaving in Love Me.Credit: Binge

The new season, directed by Bonnie Moir, taking over from first-season director Emma Freeman, picks up nine months after the first and continues the exploration of themes that have been central from the outset: questions of family ties and duties; of happiness and fulfillment in relationships; of how the past shadows and complicates the present.

Alongside the passionate union of sixty-somethings Glen and Anita, which attracted considerable coverage for its lusty portrayal of middle-aged sex, Clara and Peter (Bob Morley) also embarked on their rocky affair. They negotiated some bumps to do with her fear of vulnerability and his regrets about his strained relationship with his son, eventually deciding to persevere with their union. Meanwhile, Aaron’s fling with Ella (Shalom Brune-Franklin) ended and she subsequently discovered that she was pregnant. So for all the Mathiesons, life is complicated.

“Babies are a major theme,” says Weaving of the new season. “Near the start of the first season, there’s Christine’s death, which plunges everyone into grief and also unexpectedly propels Glen into love. In season two, Ella’s pregnant and we have a birth rather than a death, so there’s a wonderful sense of joy for Glen.”

Like Glen, Peter is dealing with unanticipated upheavals. He and Clara have decided to have a baby, a choice that has unsettling repercussions for a man who’s already the father of a troubled teenager. “We got to know a bit about Peter in the first season and he was quite emotionally evolved,” says Morley. “He’d lived a life that was a bit hedonistic and he’d come back to Melbourne to settle and focus on things that were important to him, like being a father to his son, Max (John Augustine Sharp).

“The title Love Me sends you down the pathway of love, but I feel like this is a show about vulnerability and grappling with grief and the broad range of what love can be. It’s not necessarily grand gestures: it’s being open and vulnerable, or being diligent and being present. Peter was seemingly a thoughtful and emotionally intelligent man, but he has things that he’s still grappling with. He’s willing to go down the path of fatherhood again, although he wasn’t so great the first time around, and that triggers certain aspects of himself that he may not necessarily like.”

As the Mathiesons sometimes-clumsily make their ways in a changing world, Weaving notes that the new season sees the drama’s central pairs opening out into triangles: “There are some wonderful new characters who throw spokes in the wheels”. One of them is the mystery man at Glen and Anita’s wedding (Kim Gyngell) whose significance is gradually revealed. Another is Max’s mother (Eryn Jean Norvill). Unease and uncertainty continue to buffet the family as they endeavour to follow their hearts and navigate volatile elements in their lives.

“To me, Love Me started off as a show about vulnerability and grief,” says Morley. “But it’s really about the joys of love as well as the terror of it.”

Love Me (season 2) is on Binge from Thursday, April 6.

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