Hugo Weaving is striding down Wharf 4 in Sydney’s Walsh Bay where the wind is kicking up and dark rain clouds are building. Tall and lanky, he is dressed in his signature black rehearsal jeans and T-shirt, black work boots on his feet, reading glasses hooked on his shirt neck.
He approaches with open arms, as if he might hug, but settles for a warm handshake before a quick photoshoot. Passersby stop for a look. He is recognised, perhaps from his roles in The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix, but today at least, no one approaches him for a selfie.
As we set out for a lunchtime stroll up and down the Walsh Bay wharves, I ask what he has been up to this morning. He has, he says, spent hours in the bath. “Laughing and coughing in the bath.”
He is in rehearsal for The President, he explains, and his character is taking a bath offstage. “The president is having a bath and a massage during the first half of the play,” he says. “So that’s all I’ve been doing this morning, laughing and coughing in the bath.”
The 64-year-old actor is just back in his Sydney home after 10 weeks in Dublin where The President played at the Gate theatre. Its cast is a mix of Irish and Australian actors – the play is a collaboration between the Gate theatre and Sydney Theatre Company – who are now being rehearsed into the show’s Sydney premiere. Weaving takes on the role of a fictional dictator presiding over an unnamed country in which revolution is afoot. The first lady is played by one of Ireland’s greatest actors, Olwen Fouéré.
“It’s an incredibly challenging play,” says Weaving. “Actually, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
You don’t have to talk for long to see that Weaving has a restless mind. He takes a cerebral approach to acting, finding great pleasure in studying the meaning of each word, sentence and comma in the script. For The President, by Thomas Bernhard, he spent months reading everything the Austrian writer had written, anything he could get his hands on, translated into English from the German. Bernhard’s a “a real genius”, he enthuses – his final novel, Extinction, “one of the greatest things I’ve ever read”.
The President has been “absolutely massive” to unpack intellectually, he says, because Bernhard is not in our theatrical tradition. “It’s like when they first did Waiting for Godot in England in the 1950s. They didn’t know what they were doing. They were flummoxed by it. It feels a little bit like that.”
It’s an intellectual challenge Weaving eats up.
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As we walk around the finger wharves of Walsh Bay, the water lapping beneath us, Weaving reflects on an acting career that spans film roles such as the larrikin drag queen of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, the “uber villains” of The Matrix Trilogy, V for Vendetta, and Captain America: The First Avenger, and Elrond, the Elven lord of Rivendell in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
It’s been 30 years since Weaving donned a frock made of thongs in Priscilla. He celebrated the occasion with a pint of Guinness in Dublin, where the Gate theatre and the Irish Film Institute hosted an anniversary screening.
“Priscilla was a big thing in Ireland,” he says. “It was great to see that it still means a lot to so many people. Back then, there was such repression of sexuality, the Catholic church was so strong. Ireland has changed radically, of course, but so many people told me what seeing Priscilla meant to them as young people. It was a life-changing event for some of them.”
It was for Weaving, too, and not only because it catapulted him from an actor working in Australian television and indie films to the international stage. “I remember feeling like Priscilla was the crest of a wave of something. It was a celebration of family and identity, that it’s OK to be who you are.”
And was it fun?
“Oh yeah,” he smiles. “The doing of it was more fun than any of us had ever had. Going out into that beautiful country, dressing up in frocks and being far away from home. Everyone went a bit mad – in a wonderful way.”
The film kickstarted Weaving’s Hollywood film career. “I know I got The Matrix as a result of Priscilla because the Wachowskis absolutely loved it,” Weaving says. “They have both transitioned now, but they hadn’t then. Priscilla meant a lot to them.”
The Matrix led to other villain roles. Weaving takes a cerebral approach to the bad-guy characters, too. He draws on plausible backstories for them, ponders their strengths and weaknesses. He uses his height to create a threatening stillness, lowers his raspy voice to provoke, and his expressive eyebrows to menace.
“Villains are fun,” he admits. “But it got to the point where I thought each uber villain was going to bleed into the next. By the time I did Red Skull [the villain in Captain America], I was thinking ‘that’s enough of that’.”
The same could be said after playing Elrond in The Lord of the Rings, and later The Hobbit. “He wasn’t the most satisfying character to play, to be honest. Elrond was a clothes horse and they gave me all the exposition!”
As we walk, the skies blacken. Heavy rain threatens. We retreat into the Sydney Theatre Company cafe in the nick of time. Weaving is big on walking, he says, bounding up the stairs with impressive energy. “I don’t drive, I walk. In Dublin, I walked about 35 minutes into the theatre each day because it was so cold. By the time I got there I was boiling.”
A voracious reader, he is drawn to complex texts, hence his continuing love of live theatre. Over a cup of tea, Weaving talks animatedly about the books and plays he’s reading. It can be hard to keep up with his torrent of ideas and analysis.
He’s done a lot for STC in recent years: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame; Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a production directed by the outgoing artistic director, Kip Williams. That, says Weaving, was a career highlight.
Stage work is a necessary world away from the movies and green-screen studios. It is where Weaving feels most rewarded. “I go into an extreme place when I’m working in theatre. I can’t work hard enough and there is never enough time, and then the rewards start coming with that.”
Audiences in Dublin embraced The President and Weaving often enjoyed adrink with the crew, cast or audience members after the show. “It was just thrilling,” he says.
After The President, Weaving plans several months of downtime at his property near Dungog in New South Wales. Typically he spends his relaxation time either planting trees – he likes to get his hands dirty – or reading challenging literature. He’s just finished the Booker prize winner Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, and is now reading Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole.
Once the schedule of the heavy world of the play is over, the pace will slow. It’ll be time with his wife, Katrina, son, Harry, and daughter, Holly. Vegetable planting is on his mind. “The potatoes won’t go in until August or September. Chard might be good, maybe do some onions.”
The President is playing at the Roslyn Packer theatre in Sydney from 13 April to 19 May
