Why Hugo Weaving won’t watch the Oscars
As the actor returns to the small screen for Love Me, he reflects on the golden age of television – and whether anyone has time to watch it all.
It’s probably not worth asking Hugo Weaving for tips on this year’s Oscars. He really doesn’t care. In fact, he says the whole commotion that surrounds the annual ceremony is best avoided altogether.
“Like the plague,” he clarifies in those carefully articulated gravel tones that have made his voice one of the most recognisable on the planet.
But he’s hardly alone in this thinking. Ratings for the awards have been declining for the best part of a decade, and between the La La Land and Moonlight Best Picture mix-up or that slap, it seems hardly a year goes by without the Academy finding itself at the centre of one controversy or another.
Add to that the endless product placement and actors’ eye-watering paycheques to showcase designer fashion, and it starts to look less a celebration of masterful filmmaking or performance and more one of, well, marketing.
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This story appears in the new edition of GQ magazine, available in The Australian newspaper on Friday, 10 March.
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By some estimates, Netflix poured almost $90 million into its 2019 Oscar campaign for Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma – four times the film’s actual budget – only to lose out to the much-maligned Green Book. Apple bought the rights to indie flick CODA for a reported $35 million – more than twice what the whole film cost to make – before dropping another $15 million on its successful 2022 effort to win Best Picture.
This year, British actor Andrea Riseborough raised eyebrows when she landed her first-ever Oscar nomination for her role in little-known drama To Leslie after Hollywood mates such as Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jane Fonda took to social media to rave about her performance.
All this is to say that Weaving has a point. And it’s not that he is somehow bitter about the world of red carpets and air kissing, but that it is so far removed from his own, one in which he has spent the best part of four decades carving out a reputation as one of the country’s most accomplished and interesting actors.
Weaving was born in Nigeria to English parents, and was raised in the UK before moving to Australia and attending Sydney’s Knox Grammar. From there, he studied at NIDA, graduating in 1981 to join an Australian cinema scene flush with creativity. The era, dubbed the Australian New Wave, gave us Ozploitation classics BMX Bandits, Fair Game, Midnite Spares and Mad Max 2, and set homegrown talents such as Weaving, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson and more on the path to international stardom.
But as Weaving tells it, those years are now behind us. For many young Australian actors, international success now requires moving overseas – often permanently – and actors such as Weaving who choose to stay here and support local productions are few and far between. That’s not to say he hasn’t travelled. Weaving has performed on stage and screen around the world, and although he’s worked across theatre, TV, doing voiceover work and all manner of film roles, he’s best known for his starring turns in major franchises such as The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings, and Marvel blockbuster Captain America: The First Avenger.
Still, Weaving has made Australia the focus of his work. “I’ve always championed Australian actors and projects,” he says, “not because I’m a flag waver, but I think that’s what other people are actually interested in when they see work from this country. Something that feels genuine.”
One thing that felt genuine for Weaving was the script for Love Me, a local remake of a Swedish series. The six-part first season, the first original production from Australian streamer Binge, aired in December 2021 and centred on the lives of a Melbourne family. Weaving plays Glen Mathieson, the quiet, doting husband whose days are spent caring for his heavily disabled wife, in what is a moving exploration of love and loss. The series, which also stars Bojana Novakovic, Will Lodder, Heather Mitchell, Shalom Brune-Franklin, Mitzi Ruhlmann and Celia Pacquola, continues with season two, streaming from April 6.
They sent me the scripts and it sounded really interesting. It was based on a Swedish series, Älska mig [Love Me] which had already done two seasons. I read the first script and thought it was really terrific, [Glen was] a fabulous character. The Swedish series was really lovely, but I also think we managed to improve on it enormously. Emma Freeman was the most wonderful director and I really loved the whole experience. It was an absolute joy.
The idea of doing a remake in English is not something I usually come at. I’m a bit of a purist. But there was a sense that this series was not going to travel and I didn’t think people were going to see it outside of Sweden.
So it informed a lot of what I thought we could improve upon and what I felt would translate really well as it was. It’s always good to have a sense of why something works and why it doesn’t: “How well did that actor manage the minefield of that character? Very well here, but maybe we need to change something here to make it work better”.
Season two is out soon. What can people expect from the show?
It’s just a lovely story about a family of four, set in contemporary Melbourne, and it explores grief and love. The grief that comes with the death of one family member and the love that the other family members find during that season. Season two is more focused on regeneration and the complications that come from partnerships. Your new partners also have their parents or their exes, or their family feuds. All of those things come into play. But you’re focused on the same people in the same environment.
When you’re preparing for a role like this, you must spend time reflecting on ideas of love and what it means?
I think you do. The more you pull apart a script, the more you think about a character and who they are. Glen is my age and looks exactly like me, with a pair of glasses and a haircut, but he feels radically different. He’s a very timid, conservative, beta male. It was actually lovely to play that character. This man is someone who’s been devoted to a relationship all his life. They got married too early, and perhaps he was never even in love. I had to work out how you could grieve for someone and have a family with them – and then they die and a couple of weeks later, you could propose to someone else who you’d just met [as Glen does in the first season]. That was definitely the challenge, how to make that work. So I thought about love and how it comes upon us at the most inopportune times, and how it can be so surprising and so wonderful and so transformative.
We were together and about the four-year mark, started to think about kids, and then we bought a house, a little cottage in Surry Hills. So we always wanted to live together and have children and we loved each other, but the idea of getting married seemed secondary. I don’t think either of us wanted the palaver, all the nonsense that surrounds weddings. Organising a wedding is the stuff of nightmares. But we’re still together.
It’s a very conscious choice. There was quite a lot of work offered overseas and there always is, but I choose to work here. It’s definitely been my focus, and I think always will be. But it does make it hard. When I came out of NIDA, at that stage we had decided that Australian culture was all right and I was able to get work in fabulous leading roles straight out of drama school. That’s very hard these days for young Australians because at the moment, there’s a strong tendency to cast leads from overseas and bring them out here.
Does it feel like some of that previous cultural cringe factor is returning, when it comes to supporting local talent and local productions?
What a lot of producers will try to do is cast someone who’s both Australian and an international star. That’s the first port of call. And when that’s not possible, they think, “Well we’ve just got to find an international star”. When I came out [of NIDA], I wasn’t an international star, not at all. Nor was Mel Gibson or Nicole Kidman or Cate Blanchett.
So they got roles in things here before they were well known and then they became exportable. But when that doesn’t happen and you don’t cast your own young actors, when you just need to put a name in straight away because the bucks are more important than the culture, then you end up having a dearth of well-known Australian actors for a whole generation. Also, young actors just head to Los Angeles because they think there’s nothing here for them. So you lose a whole lot of people. That’s a continual battle and it’s definitely being waged again.
There seems to be so much film and TV being produced these days. Is there such a thing as too much choice?
It feels like we don’t have a central forum. Where do you go to find out what’s on? And who’s telling us what’s good or not? Now of course, the platforms themselves send advertising directly to our phones, so we’re getting information directly from the horse’s mouth about how good their own product is. [laughs] But how do you watch all this stuff anyway? I’m so far behind. A friend of mine, Mark Winter, made a film last year called The Rooster [a mystery drama in which Weaving stars]. Very low-budget film, which he shot in a short period of time but is actually wonderful and I hope it does really well. So those are the sort of projects I get excited by. I’ve been doing that for years. No one sees half of these things! But that has always been my focus.
I never do anything unless I really want to, but occasionally you do something that doesn‘t turn out as well as you’d hoped – and that’s the thing that everyone loves. You think, “God, it’s a pile of shit!” [laughs] While often the thing that you think is really interesting gets hosed down the drain and no one sees it. So it does feel like a lot of good things are getting lost because there’s just so much of it.
You’ve done TV, stage, big movies, small movies. Was there ever a temptation to do a few more of those major blockbusters and find yourself a private island somewhere?
Of course everyone would love to clock up the dollars and buy the private island. [laughs] It was great to have the opportunity to do The Matrix but I didn’t do the last one because I didn’t think it was a good idea. I think you can push these things a bit too far. Same thing with The Lord of the Rings. I enjoyed being part of that world and there were three films and then The Hobbit, which was one film that became three films. After the success of The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix, I got a couple of offers and thought, “If I said yes to those, that’s all I will ever be doing”. So I felt it was time to put the brakes on. As a result, my profile is not as high as it might have been, but I’ve done some really interesting work, even though it hasn’t been super visible. But that’s the trade off you make.
One of the ways studios break through the noise is social media, which you've pretty successfully avoided.
I was one of the first Instagrammers. When I finally got a mobile phone, I was on Instagram before almost anyone. I thought it was a beautiful little visual poem. I think it’s terrible now. It’s just advertising pumping at you. I love photography so I do still post, just not under my own name because the person who posts under my name is not me – but that’s another matter. But I’ve never been on Facebook or Twitter or TikTok. I suppose there are drawbacks to all of that, but my life is noisy enough. Instagram was a really beautiful idea that’s been perverted. I think all of these forums get perverted.
Have you managed to catch many of this year’s Oscar contenders? Any favourites?
I don’t watch the Oscars and I don’t follow who the contenders are, though I imagine Cate [Blanchett, nominated for Best Actress for her role in Tár] would be up there. I don’t always see the Oscar-nominated films because I don’t think they’re necessarily as interesting as some of the other releases, even though The Banshees of Inisherin is [nominated] and I hope it wins because I thought it was a fantastic film.
But I don’t have an opinion on who’s going to win what. I think those awards nights – the Academy Awards or the AACTAs – are totally corrupt these days and to be avoided like the plague. My favourite filmmaker is [Turkish director] Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Ruben Östlund and Joachim Trier are great, too. I always gravitate towards films that aren’t up for Oscars.
When you say they’re corrupt, in the sense that they have become more about marketing than about filmmaking?
They’re really just a way for the major channels to advertise themselves and their own product. Now, I’m not saying the Oscars are corrupt, but… hey, I expect they are. [laughs] But there’s so much bullshit and nonsense surrounding them every year. I can’t stand watching them and I can’t stand listening to it all. It’s everything I hate about the industry and nothing that I love about it. So there you go.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.