Hugo Weaving

Hugo Wallace Weaving AO (born 4 April 1960) is a British actor. Born in Nigeria, Weaving has lived in Australia since 1976, although he retains British citizenship. He undertook his acting training at NIDA in Sydney. He became known internationally for his appearances in the Australian films Proof (1991) and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), and more widely known as Agent Smith in the first three The Matrix films (1999–2003) and Elrond in The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003), which were American productions.

Weaving landed his first major role as English cricket captain Douglas Jardine on the Australian television series Bodyline (1984), and won his first AACTA Award for Priscilla. He is also known for his role as the title character in V for Vendetta (2005), The Wolfman (2010), Johann Schmidt / Red Skull in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), and again as Elrond in the The Hobbit trilogy (2012–2014). He has won many Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Awards for his film and television performances, as well as other awards for stage performances.

He has also several voice-over roles, including in the films Babe (1995), Happy Feet (2006), Happy Feet Two (2011), and as Megatron in the Transformers series (2007–2011). He reprised his roles of Agent Smith and Elrond in Matrix and Lord of the Rings video game adaptations.

Early life and education

Hugo Wallace Weaving was born on 4 April 1960 at the University of Ibadan Teaching Hospital, in Ibadan, Nigeria to parents: mother Anne Lennard, a tour guide and former teacher, and father Wallace Weaving, a seismologist, who met as students at the University of Bristol. His maternal grandmother was Belgian. A year after his birth, his family returned to the United Kingdom, living in Bedford and Brighton. They later moved to Melbourne and Sydney in Australia; Johannesburg in South Africa; and then returned to the United Kingdom.

While in the UK, Weaving attended The Downs School, Wraxall, near Bristol, and Queen Elizabeth's Hospital. While at the Downs School, in 1973, Weaving played one of his first theatrical roles, taking the part of Captain Asquith in Robert Bolt's The Thwarting of Baron Bolligrew. His family moved back to Sydney, Australia in 1976 with the intention to settle; however his parents separated not long after they migrated. In Sydney, he attended Knox Grammar School.

He went on to study at Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Art, graduating with a Diploma of Dramatic Art (Acting) in 1981. Weaving has said that though his roots are in Australia, and he considers it his country, he feels neither wholly English nor wholly Australian.

Career

1984–1998

Weaving's first television role was in the 1984 Australian television series Bodyline, as the English cricket captain Douglas Jardine. Weaving appeared in the Australian miniseries The Dirtwater Dynasty in 1988 and as Geoffrey Chambers in the drama Barlow and Chambers: A Long Way From Home. He starred opposite Nicole Kidman in the 1989 TV mini-series Bangkok Hilton. In 1991, Weaving received the Australian Film Institute's "Best Actor" award for his performance in the low-budget Proof as the blind photographer. He appeared as Sir John in Yahoo Serious's 1993 comedy Reckless Kelly, a lampoon of Australian outlaw Ned Kelly.

In the mid-1990s, Weaving portrayed the drag queen Anthony "Tick" Belrose/Mitzi Del Bra in the 1994 film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and provided the voice of Rex the sheepdog in the 1995 family film Babe and its 1998 sequel Babe: Pig in the City. In 1998, he received the "Best Actor" award from the Montreal World Film Festival for his performance as a suspected serial killer in The Interview.

1999–2010

Weaving played the enigmatic and evil-minded Agent Smith in the 1999 film The Matrix. He later reprised that role in the film's 2003 sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. He was a voice actor in the cartoon film The Magic Pudding.

He received additional acclaim in the role of the half-elven lord Elrond in Peter Jackson's three-film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, released between 2001 and 2003. Weaving was the main actor in Andrew Kotatko's award-winning film Everything Goes (2004). He starred as a heroin-addicted ex-rugby league player in the 2005 Australian indie film Little Fish, opposite Cate Blanchett. Weaving played the title role as V in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, in which he was reunited with the Wachowskis, creators of The Matrix trilogy, who wrote the adapted screenplay. Actor James Purefoy was originally signed to play the role, but was fired six weeks into filming over creative differences. Weaving reshot most of Purefoy's scenes as V (even though his face is never seen) apart from a couple of minor dialogue-free scenes early in the film while stuntman David Leitch performed all of V's stunts.

Weaving reprised his role as Elrond for the video game The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II. He regularly appears in productions by the Sydney Theatre Company (STC). In 2006, he worked with Cate Blanchett on a reprise of the STC production of Hedda Gabler in New York City.

In a controversial move by director Michael Bay, Weaving was chosen as the Decepticon leader Megatron vocally in the 2007 live-action film Transformers, rather than using the original version of the character's voice created by the voice actor Frank Welker. Weaving himself was unaware of the controversy, having accepted the role based on Michael Bay's personal request; in a November 2008 Sun Herald interview, he said he had never seen Transformers. Though Weaving reprised his role in two sequels, he does not have much personal investment in the Transformers films. In February 2010, Weaving revealed to The Age: "Director Michael Bay talks to me on the phone. I've never met him. We were doing the voice for the second one and I still hadn't seen the first one. I still didn't really know who the characters were and I didn't know what anything was. It's a voice job, for sure, and people assume I've spent my life working on it, but I really know so little about it." In 2012, Weaving said to Collider: "It was one of the only things I've ever done where I had no knowledge of it, I didn't care about it, I didn't think about it. They wanted me to do it. In one way, I regret that bit. I don't regret doing it, but I very rarely do something if it's meaningless. It was meaningless to me, honestly. I don't mean that in any nasty way."

Weaving played a supporting role in Joe Johnston's 2010 remake of the 1941 film The Wolfman, starring Benicio del Toro. Immediately after Wolfman wrapped in spring 2008, he returned home to Australia to film a lead role in the film Last Ride, directed by Glendyn Ivin. In early 2009, Guillermo del Toro, then director of The Hobbit films, prequels to The Lord of the Rings, confirmed his intent to again cast Weaving as Elrond of Rivendell in a BBC interview. When asked about reprising the role, Weaving replied that he was game, but had not officially been approached. Del Toro eventually left the project; Peter Jackson decided to direct the films himself but Weaving was not officially confirmed in the cast until May 2011.

Weaving spent the summer of 2009 starring in the Melbourne Theatre Company's production of God of Carnage, portraying the caustic lawyer Alain Reille. He returned to the stage in November 2010 in Sydney Theatre Company's Uncle Vanya, co-starring Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh. Weaving filmed a guest role on Roxburgh's Australian TV series Rake in May 2010.

In May 2009, Weaving accepted a co-starring role in the docudrama Oranges and Sunshine, about the forced migration of thousands of British children to Australia in the 1950s. Filming began in autumn 2009 in Nottingham, England, and Adelaide, South Australia, and continued through January 2010. The film premiered at the Rome International Film Festival on 28 October 2010 and garnered positive reviews. 2010 saw the release of Legend of the Guardians (formerly The Guardians of Ga'Hoole), in which Weaving has another high-profile voice role, portraying two different owls named Noctus and Grimble in Zack Snyder's film adaptation of Kathryn Lasky's popular series of children's books.

On 4 May 2010, it was officially confirmed by Marvel Studios that Weaving would play the Nazi supervillain Johann Schmidt / Red Skull in the superhero film Captain America: The First Avenger. Weaving completed filming his role on the project in September 2010 and returned to Sydney to prepare for Uncle Vanya. It is unlikely he will sign on for any further installments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU); in an August 2011 Baltimore Sun interview, the actor confided he is weary of typecasting and of "blockbuster" films in general: "I think I've about had enough... I'm not sure how many more of them I'll make. It doesn't feel to me as though they've been the majority of my work, though that's probably the way it seems to most other people." Red Skull returned in the MCU films Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), with Ross Marquand replacing Weaving in the role.

2011–present

On 13 March 2011, The Key Man, which Weaving filmed in 2006, finally debuted at the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. The child migrant saga Oranges and Sunshine opened in the UK on 1 April, the culmination of months of success on the festival circuit in late 2010-early 2011. In March, the Sydney Theatre Company and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced that STC's 2010 production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya would be reprised in Washington, D.C., during the month of August. In April, months of speculation finally ended when Weaving appeared on The Hobbit's New Zealand set, shortly before a production spokesman officially confirmed the actor's return as Elrond in Peter Jackson's prequel trilogy to The Lord of the Rings. He was part of the cast of the Wachowskis' adaptation of David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas. The project, co-starring Tom Hanks, Ben Whishaw, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, and Susan Sarandon, began filming in September 2011 and was released in October 2012.

2012 found Weaving re-focusing on his theatrical career, with a return to the Sydney Theatre Company to star in a new adaptation of Christopher Hampton's play Les Liaisons Dangereuses in March. He portrayed the notorious Vicomte de Valmont, a character he first played onstage in 1987. His frequent stage foil Pamela Rabe costarred. Weaving and Cate Blanchett reprised their roles in STC's internationally lauded production of Uncle Vanya for a ten-day run at New York's Lincoln Center in July.

The busy actor joined the cast of three forthcoming Australian films in summer 2012. The Western-tinged police thriller Mystery Road, written and directed by Ivan Sen, began filming in June 2012. Weaving appeared in the prison drama Healing for director Craig Monahan, with whom he previously made The Interview (1998) and Peaches (2005). He appeared in a segment of the Australian anthology film The Turning, based on Tim Winton's collection of linked stories, entitled "The Commission", directed by David Wenham. He ended 2013 co-starring with Richard Roxburgh and Philip Quast in Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot, for the Sydney Theatre Company.

In the spring of 2013, Weaving reprised the Agent Smith role for a General Electric television commercial for their "Brilliant Machines" innovations in healthcare management technology, which was slated to air during a break from 13 April's edition of Saturday Night Live, and subsequently continued to receive multiple airings on major cable networks.

From 26 July to 27 September 2014, Weaving played the titular role of Sydney Theatre Company's production of Macbeth. In an unusual treatment of the Shakespearian tragedy by young Sydney director Kip Williams, Weaving's performance was described by Peter Gotting of The Guardian as "the role of his career".

In October 2015, Weaving joined the cast of the film adaption of Craig Silvey's novel Jasper Jones. In 2018, Weaving starred as Thaddeus Valentine in Mortal Engines. In the same year, he appeared alongside Benedict Cumberbatch in the miniseries Patrick Melrose. In 2020, Weaving starred as Alfred in Tony Kushner's adaptation of The Visit. Since 2021, Weaving has starred as Glen Mathieson in the Australian intergenerational drama series Love Me. In 2024, Weaving played character Frank Harkness in season 4 of Slow Horses.

Other ventures

In 2004, Weaving became an ambassador for Australian animal rights organisation Voiceless, the animal protection institute. He attends events, promotes Voiceless in interviews, and assists in their judging of annual grants recipients.

Since 2020 and as of 2026[update], Weaving is on the board of the Adelaide Film Festival.

Personal life

When he was 13 years old, Weaving was diagnosed with epilepsy. Although the condition rarely affected him and stopped in his early 30s, he still chooses not to drive, given the risk of a seizure.

He said in a 2014 interview that he "hate[s] flag-waving", and that although he holds a British passport, he does not feel English when he's in England.

Weaving has been in a relationship with Katrina Greenwood since 1984; they live in Sydney and have two children together: Harry Greenwood, an actor, and Holly Greenwood, an artist. The children were given their mother's surname, which Weaving's son described as the family's "stand against the patriarchy."

Weaving has a brother and a sister. He is the uncle of actress Samara Weaving, who began her career in Australia before transitioning to American roles. Both appeared in the 2013 Australian film Mystery Road. His younger niece Morgan Weaving appeared on the Australian soap opera Home and Away alongside her sister.

Awards and honours

• 1991 – Australian Film Institute Awards, Best Actor in a Lead Role: Proof
• 1998 – Australian Film Institute Awards, Best Actor in a Lead Role: The Interview
• 2005 – Australian Film Institute Awards, Best Actor in a Lead Role: Little Fish
• 2005 – IF Award: Little Fish
• 2007 – The Constellation Awards, Best Male Performance in a 2006 Science Fiction Film, TV Movie, or Miniseries: V for Vendetta
• 2008 – V Australia IF Living Legend award, a lifetime achievement award
• 2011 – Sydney Theatre Award, Best Supporting Actor: Uncle Vanya
• 2012 – Helen Hayes Award, Best Supporting Performer, Non-Resident Production: Uncle Vanya
• 2018 – Helpmann Award for Best Male Actor in a Play, for Arturo Ui in the Sydney Theatre Company's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
• 2018 – Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film: Patrick Melrose
• 2020 – Fargo Film Festival, Best Actor: Hearts and Bones
• 2020 – Officer of the Order of Australia (AO)
• 2024 - AACTA Award for Best Lead Actor in a Television Drama: Love Me
• 2024 - AACTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role: The Rooster

Filmography

Film

Television

Video games

Theatre

Further reading

• The Dictionary of Performing Arts in Australia – Theatre . Film . Radio . Television – Volume 1 – Ann Atkinson, Linsay Knight, Margaret McPhee – Allen & Unwin Pty. Ltd., 1996
• The Australian Film and Television Companion – compiled by Tony Harrison – Simon & Schuster Australia, 1994

External links

• at IMDb
• at TCM