Hugo Weaving

Hugo Weaving was born in Nigeria to British parents, moved to Australia in 1976 and trained at NIDA in Sydney, and what followed is essentially two careers running in parallel. In Australia he has been a serious actor for forty years and holds six AACTA awards, the first of them for Proof in 1991. Three years later he was one of the drag performers crossing the desert in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which remains the warmest thing he has done.

Then international work found him, and it found him for one specific quality. Weaving articulates. He places consonants with an exactness that reads as control, and directors use it to build characters convinced they are the only rational person in the room: Agent Smith in The Matrix, delivering contempt at a measured pace; Elrond in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, elegantly certain that everyone else is about to fail; V in V for Vendetta, an entire performance behind a mask that never moves, where the voice carries all of it. He voiced Megatron across three Transformers films for much the same reason, and played Red Skull in Captain America: The First Avenger.

The Australian films are where the range actually lives, though, and most of that work never left the country. Hacksaw Ridge, which did, gives him a drunk and damaged veteran father and he takes the film away from everyone else in it. He is an Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia, and his first major role, back in 1984, was the English cricket captain Douglas Jardine in the series Bodyline.