Hugo Weaving was an Australian character actor whose exposure internationally had mostly been relegated to the voice of a sheepdog in the two “Babe” movies. But starting with the Wachowskis’ mind-melting “The Matrix” in 1999, he became a staple of big budget franchise films, appearing in all three “Lord of the Rings” films for Peter Jackson and the subsequent “Matrix” sequels for the Wachowskis, along with three “Transformers” movies for Michael Bay, both “Happy Feet” movies, one of the “Hobbit” sequels and “Captain America: The First Avenger.” In recent years he’s been most franchise-free, save for a turn in the Jackson-produced would-be blockbuster “Mortal Engines,” and his involvement in two of the series he was best known for have remained open question marks.
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First (and most pressingly), the actor confirms to Time Out that he won’t be back for the untitled fourth “Matrix” film, which Warner Bros has scheduled for May 21, 2021. “It’s unfortunate but actually I had this offer and then the offer came from The Matrix,’ so I knew it was happening but I didn’t have dates. I thought [I] could do both and it took eight weeks to work out that the dates would work – I held off on accepting [a role in ‘The Visit’ during that time]. I was in touch with [director] Lana Wachowski, but in the end she decided that the dates weren’t going to work,” Weaving explained to the outlet. “So we’d sorted the dates and then she sort of changed her mind.”
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Another issue that was touched upon was Weaving’s absence from “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame,” where his “Captain America” character Red Skull appeared as the guardian of the Soul Stone (and was responsible for two key deaths). Weirdly, the character showed up as a completely computer-generated figure voiced by “The Walking Dead” actor Ross Marquand, who does a killer Hugo Weaving impression.
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Apparently Weaving was willing to come back and ready to sign up for the standard Marvel three picture deal. “I was thinking [Red Skull] probably wouldn’t come back in ‘Captain America’ but he may well come back as a villain in ‘The Avengers.’ By then, they’d pushed back on the contracts that we agreed on and so the money they offered me for ‘The Avengers’ was much less than I got for the very first one, and this was for two films,” Weaving explained to Time Out. “And the promise when we first signed the contracts was that the money would grow each time. They said: ‘It’s just a voice job, it’s not a big deal.’ I actually found negotiating with them through my agent impossible. And I didn’t really wanna do it that much. But I would have done it.” We assume that the negotiating was done during the notoriously cheap Ike Perlmutter era and it’s interesting that he assumes that Red Skull, not Loki, would have been the big bad in Joss Whedon’s first “Avengers.” Talk about an alternate timeline!