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'Anything that says celebrity, I ain’t': Lunch with Hugo Weaving
"I'm just a dag," says Hugo Weaving, leaning forward and smiling. "I get that people see famous people as someone other than a dag. But actually everyone's just a dag. For god's sake, we are."
We're talking celebrity – and Weaving's refusal to take part in it or really even acknowledge he is one – over matching bowls of minestrone with baby blue lentils and a glass of A.Retief sangiovese from the Urban Winery Sydney in Moore Park. "I only had one because I knew you wanted one," he says of the wine. I don't even drink that much, I reply, my knowledge of wine pretty much extends to saying something "tastes like wine" and stops there.
Hugo Weaving enjoys a glass of A.Retief sangiovese over lunch at the Urban Winery Sydney in Moore Park. Credit: James Brickwood
"I know a little about Italian wines," he says. "But I used to go in [to a shop] and go, 'Now that's a $20 bottle, that's a $50 bottle, so that one must be better.' So I started buying purely on price, which is such a ridiculous trap because it's probably just an overpriced wine."
The Urban Winery is just around the corner from Fox Studios, where Weaving is rehearsing Wonnangatta, a Gothic two-hander with Wayne Blair based on a real-life mystery and one that marks Sydney Theatre Company's return to the stage after a six-month shutdown due to COVID-19.
He jokes that he doesn't even need to be here: the play, written by Angus Cerini and directed by Jessica Arthur, is sold out due to this new age of socially distanced theatre. But being picked over by journalists is something he has become used to. "I know the journalistic angle, so it's like, 'Ah that's what the article is going to be about,' so I try to head that off at the pass, that's not what I'm actually involved with. That's the only thing but it's not a problem."
For someone who has spent a large part of his career being professionally intimidating – from the arrogant English cricketer Douglas Jardine in Bodyline to the imperious, pointy-eared elf king Elrond in the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the cruel and abusive father in Patrick Melrose – he is remarkably soft in person. Not shy, just gentle and thoughtful. The most heat he manages to muster in our conversation is when he says with surprising force, "I don't like hedges, I actually hate them."
He says with surprising force, “I don’t like hedges, I actually hate them.”
He's more of a free-form tree man and spent a large part of lockdown planting natives with his partner Katrina Greenwood on their property in Dungog, in the Hunter Valley. "I particularly love planting native trees – they just be what they want to be. They shouldn't take too much work."
Just being what he wants to be pretty much sums up Weaving, too. He's a man of his craft – he loves telling stories but not selling himself. He watched MasterChef in lockdown – was very excited by the final and their focus on native ingredients – but the idea of taking part in any type of celebrity MasterChef makes him visibly recoil. "No, never. Anything that says celebrity, I ain't," he says.
On second thought, he adds that he did see a celebrity version of The Great British Bake Off when he was in London earlier in the year preparing for a role in The Visit with the National Theatre.
"That was a little bit different – they were basically raising money for charities and I thought that was pretty cool," he says. "But no, I don't really like that whole reality thing, using the celebs to sell the show. I hope they get paid unbelievably well for it because they should, because they're being abused," he says, laughing.
The bowl of minestrone with baby blue lentils from the Urban Winery Sydney. Credit: James Brickwood
He reckons he's not very good at pop culture – when asked what else he likes to watch on TV, he responds with a slightly puzzled, "I used to watch Lateline on the ABC" – and has no desire to up his social media game like his good friend Sam Neill.
"He is a dag," says Weaving, who made a bathtub cameo in one of Neill's Cinema Quarantine micro films on Twitter. "He's got about 50 gazillion followers. Now a few years ago, I never thought Sam would do that but I think he thought the whole machine of film has changed – the way in which people get jobs, the way people see films has changed – and he was just very canny and thought, 'OK, I'm going to start tweeting.' He just made a smart move but I couldn't ever do that."
Why not?
"I just don't want to for me. I don't want to say, 'Hey look at my latest film,' or, 'Check me out here.' I can't do that. I cannot do that."
If he's not good at pop culture, I say, how did he end up working with Marvel, who are the top of the pop culture tree, the manicured hedge to Weaving's free-form native?
"But it wasn't when I said yes to it," he says of his role as Hitler's villainous protege Red Skull in 2008's Captain America. "They'd only made one Marvel film when I said yes."
In seemingly true Weaving style, he didn't want to do it, much like his role as Agent Smith in The Matrix (we'll get to that next), but was convinced after he saw the drawings of his character Red Skull, who looks like, well, a red skull.
"The whole idea of playing a Nazi was hilarious because it was one of those, when you're a young actor, you go, 'I'm sure one day you'll end up in a German uniform, pretending to be a Nazi'," he says. "And then suddenly he was an uber, uber Nazi who thought Hitler was an absolute nothing. So I read it and thought it would be really fun to do that, because I thought he had the most hilarious lines as well. And also, I was mostly in a prosthetic mask and could hide away and have fun."
The receipt for lunch with Hugo Weaving.Credit: Louise Rugendyke
And what about The Matrix – the science-fiction trilogy in which he played the bad guy opposite Keanu Reeves' good guy Neo – did he ever have an inkling it would be as big as it would be? "I did actually," he says. "I thought it was pretty different and special."
Again, it was another movie he didn't want to do, even though the directors, Lana and Lilly Wachowski – then known as Larry and Andy – sought him out for the role after being impressed with his work in Proof and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. His first excuse was he didn't have time but, after being pestered to read a few pages, he thought it was funny and soon ended up in Los Angeles, where he clicked with the Wachowskis, who were talking as if he already had the part.
He went on to shoot three Matrix films with them but is not involved with the fourth, now shooting in Berlin, after there was a clash of dates with his National Theatre job in London.
"I'd said yes to them, to going back and doing it, but it didn't work out," says. "I'd love to be in Berlin, it'd be really nice to spend time with Keanu and Carrie-Anne [Moss] again and all of that crew. But it was fine, it wasn't like I was, 'I must go back and do The Matrix.' We'd already done three of them. So I had some reservations about doing another one but not enough to make me say I don't want to do another one. It felt very much like I should go back and do it because it's a family story if you like, so I felt like I should do it, but Lana couldn't make the dates work."
The Matrix and then The Lord of the Rings trilogy shot Weaving into the stratosphere, he was the king of the nerds, but it was never a place he aspired to be. Even when he was fresh out of NIDA in 1981 and working alongside Mel Gibson and Judy Davis at STC, he says his head was never turned by the type of fame Gibson and Davis had already secured. "I think, seriously, if that's what you're interested in, you're going to come a cropper," he says. "I don't think it's a very smart way of proceeding."
His favourite roles are on the smaller side – Lionel, the heroin-addicted former NRL star in Rowan Woods and Jacquelin Perske's Little Fish; the psychiatrist in the ABC miniseries Seven Types of Ambiguity; or the abusive father in HBO series Patrick Melrose. "They're all different. I don't know. Lots of things I've loved, but lots of things I haven't."
How does he maintain a sense of balance in a profession that is now purpose-built for celebrity?
"I always try and look at things from the other perspective, in order to balance out my own sense of what something is. I look at the problems through someone else's eyes. And if I'm in conflict with someone internally, I think maybe they're in conflict with me, what are they thinking about what I've done, how do they see me? I always try and understand the other person."
So you're a lover, not a fighter?
"I'll fight if I think the other person is a fighter. I don't mean going fisticuffs but if they're one-eyed about something, I try to understand other people. But if I come up against other people who are just selfish, then that's more difficult. But I think we all feel that."
The STC publicist has now materialised, which means our time is up and it's back to the rehearsal room for Weaving. Before he goes, I've got one last question: is it true he doesn't drive?
"Katrina drives," he says. "She bought an old Land Rover many, many years ago as an incentive. I didn't drive because I was an epileptic. I didn't learn how to drive, I wasn't that interested in cars anyway, I wasn't a boysy boy, a blokey boy, so I never learnt how to drive and I wasn't allowed to get a licence. I just went years walking, bussing and then, as soon as I started earning money, I was like Mr Cab. And then eventually, as I grew out of my epilepsy, I kept saying I should and I was already 40-something. Kat drives and she's a great driver."
Is he a backseat driver?
"I'm a passenger, a passenger in my own life."
Urban Winery Sydney, Building 121, Bent Street The Entertainment Quarter, Moore Park. Friday and Saturday, noon to 11pm, Sunday, noon to 8pm
Wonnangatta is Roslyn Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay, from September 21 to October 24.
correction
An earlier version of this story said that Hugo Weaving worked with Neil Armfield on the movie Little Fish. That is incorrect. The film was directed by Rowan Woods and written by Jacquelin Perske.