Hugo Weaving Laments Time in Middle-earth; Not First to Dislike a Classic

It probably shouldn’t be a huge shock that Hugo Weaving has admitted to not really feeling The Lord of the Rings movies. After all, if you were stuck in Rivendell playing Elrond the half-elven for years, reciting lines primarily for haughty, eyebrow-arched exposition while everyone else got to battle orcs and ride giant eagles, you might feel a bit bitter too.

Discussing the new season of the Tolkien prequel, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the British actor revealed this week that he hasn’t watched a second of the Amazon Prime Video show. Nor has he seen actor Robert Aramayo’s portrayal of a younger Elrond, because he “spent too long in Middle-earth” and doesn’t “particularly want to go back there.” Speaking to Radio Times, Weaving described his part as “not a role that I think of with the same sort of stature in my head as it might do for fans.”

This perspective might be understandable. Although those movies are untouchable masterpieces for many of us who watch them repeatedly, they can be nothing more than a time-consuming paycheck for the actors involved. Weaving isn’t the first actor to harbor a distaste for a beloved genre role.

Alec Guinness was less than enthusiastic about his Oscar-nominated role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. He once told Talk magazine that he suggested to George Lucas to kill off the Jedi Master in 1977’s Star Wars because he “couldn’t go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines.” Guinness also wrote in his memoir, “A Positively Final Appearance,” that he agreed to give a young fan an autograph on the condition the boy would never watch the movie again.

In 1978, Marlon Brando was somehow convinced by Warner Bros. to play Superman’s father, Jor-El, in a big budget reboot of the superhero franchise. Brando received an impressive $3.7 million and 11.75% of the box office gross. However, he showed such minimal interest in the role that filmmakers had to entice him out of his trailer with food just to get him to do a day’s shoot. Even then, Brando refused to learn his lines, requiring the crew to use cue cards.

The list of similarly disgruntled actors goes on. Harrison Ford, who also criticized Star Wars’ clunky dialogue, detested the original cut of 1982’s Blade Runner so much that it was rumored he recorded the film’s voiceover with the least enthusiasm possible, hoping it would be discarded. He denied this, stating he was contractually obliged to record the audio but did so imagining it wouldn’t be used.

Max von Sydow might have disliked portraying Ming the Merciless in 1980’s Flash Gordon, and it’s hard to picture Orson Welles enjoying voicing the villain Unicron in 1986’s animated The Transformers: The Movie. It seems unlikely that Oscar winner Faye Dunaway relished playing the villainous Selena in 1984’s critically panned Supergirl.

The difference between the past and the modern day is that performances by actors like Guinness and Brando changed perspectives on genre fare. These days, Blade Runner is considered a dystopian masterpiece. Star Wars is part of Hollywood history, and if high-caliber actors like Stellan Skarsgård, Diego Luna, and Adam Driver are involved, it’s hard to argue there’s any stigma attached to roles in ostensibly very silly space movies about wizards with laser swords.

In a way, it’s surprising to see Weaving biting the fantasy hand that feeds him, albeit in a polite and semi-apologetic manner.

We can, of course, forgive him. Like Guinness and Brando before him, if the actor truly is just phoning it in for the money in Jackson’s swords and sorcery series, only the guy whose job it was to cajole him onto the sound stage would be able to tell.

Source: The Guardian