Hugo Weaving

Hugo Wallace Weaving (born 4 April 1960) is a British actor.

He is the recipient of six Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards (AACTA) and has been recognised as an Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia.

Born in Colonial Nigeria to English parents, he has resided in Australia for the entirety of his career.

Weaving was born on 4 April 1960 at the University of Ibadan Teaching Hospital, in Ibadan, Nigeria to English parents; he is the son of Anne Lennard (born 1934), a tour guide and former teacher, and Wallace Weaving (born 1929), 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 before moving to Melbourne and Sydney in Australia; Johannesburg in South Africa; and then returning to the United Kingdom again.

While in the UK, he 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 Australia in 1976, where he attended Knox Grammar School in Sydney.

He graduated from Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1981.

Weaving landed his first major role as English cricket captain Douglas Jardine on the Australian television series Bodyline (1984).

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 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.

He rose to prominence with his appearances in the Australian films Proof (1991) and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), winning his first AACTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for the former.

By the turn of the millennium, Weaving achieved international recognition through roles in mainstream American productions.

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 addition to his live action appearances, Weaving has had several voice over roles, including in the films Babe (1995), Happy Feet (2006) and Happy Feet Two (2011), and the Transformers series as Megatron (2007–2011).

He reprised his roles of Agent Smith and Elrond in Matrix and Lord of the Rings video game adaptations.

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.

His most notable film roles include Agent Smith in the first three The Matrix films (1999–2003), Elrond in The Lord of the Rings (2001–2003) and The Hobbit (2012–2014) trilogies, the title character in V for Vendetta (2005), and Johann Schmidt / Red Skull in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film Captain America: The First Avenger (2011).

Weaving played the enigmatic and evil-minded Agent Smith in the 1999 film The Matrix.

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.

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.

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."