It probably shouldn’t come as 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 with lines that only ever seemed to be given to you for the purpose of haughty, eyebrow-arched exposition, while everyone else got to battle orcs and ride on giant eagles, you might be a little bit bitter too.
Discussing the new season of Tolkien prequel The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the British actor revealed this week that he’s not seen so much as a second of the Amazon Prime Video show – nor actor Robert Aramayo’s portrayal of the 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 the part of the mystical, immortal ring bearer, which he played in all three films in Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning fantasy trilogy as “in a funny way, not a role that I think of with the same sort of stature in my head as it might do for fans”.
All of which is sort of fair enough. Those movies might be untouchable totems of genre magnificence for those of us who watch them over and over – see also the original Star Wars trilogy, the early Terminator flicks and anything by Paul Verhoeven between 1987 and 1997 (except Showgirls) – but that doesn’t mean they are anything more than a time-consuming paycheque for those who actually have to film the damn things. And Weaving isn’t the first genre actor held in high regard by fans to have been about as fond of playing Elrond as Frodo Baggins might be of a night on the tiles with the Witch-king of Angmar.
Alec Guinness was less than enthusiastic about Star Wars and his Oscar-nominated role as Obi-Wan Kenobi, once telling Talk magazine that it was his idea to have the Jedi Master killed off in 1977’s Star Wars because he “couldn’t go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines. I’d had enough of the mumbo jumbo”. Guinness also wrote in his memoir A Positively Final Appearance that he had told a young Star Wars fan who approached him and revealed to the actor he had seen the movie a hundred times that he would deliver the boy an autograph only if he promised never to watch it again.
In 1978, Warner Bros somehow convinced Marlon Brando to play Superman’s dad, Jor-El, in a big budget relaunch of the superhero franchise. While Brando received an incredible payday for the time – a reported $3.7m and 11.75% of the box office gross profits – he had such minimally pitiful interest in the role that the film-makers were forced to lure him out from his trailer with food, just to get him to carry out a day’s shoot. Even then, Brando refused to learn his lines, so the crew had to produce cue cards for him.
The list goes on. Harrison Ford (who had a thing or two to say about Star Wars’ clunky dialogue, too) detested the original cut of 1982’s Blade Runner to such an extent that it was once rumoured he had recorded the film’s languid and dry noir-style voiceover with the least enthusiasm he could possibly get away with in the hope that it would never be used (the actor has denied this – saying he was contractually obliged to record the audio, but did so imagining it would be dispensed with). Unfortunately for Ford it would take another decade before 1992’s Ridley Scott-approved Director’s Cut excised the explanatory dialogue and a horrid tacked-on happy ending, though the actor still didn’t like it much. It’s not known what he thought of 2007’s Final Cut, considered by many as the definitive version, but given Ford returned to the role of Rick Deckard in 2017’s Blade Runner 2049, he can’t have hated it all that much.
For all we know, Max von Sydow might have detested portraying Ming the Merciless in 1980’s Flash Gordon, while it’s hard to imagine Orson Welles much enjoying his voice turn as planet-eating villain Unicron in 1986’s animated The Transformers: The Movie. Did Oscar winner Faye Dunaway relish her role as the villainous Selena in 1984’s critically panned Supergirl? It seems unlikely.
The difference between the 70s and 80s and the modern-day is that performances such as those by Guinness and Brando transformed perspectives on genre fare, even if they were phoning it in from somewhere four parsecs east of Tatooine. These days, Blade Runner is considered a dystopian, Vangelis-washed masterpiece, even if that means avoiding the awful theatrical cut of the film when it keeps popping up as the only option to watch on Now TV or Netflix. Star Wars is part of Hollywood history – if actors of the calibre of Stellan Skarsgård, Diego Luna and Adam Driver are onboard, it’s impossible to argue that there is any kind of stigma attached to taking a role in ostensibly very silly space movies about wizards with laser swords and telekinetic powers.
And so, in a way, it’s a little bit of a surprise to see Weaving rather biting the fantasy hand that feeds him (even if he does it in such an impeccably polite and semi-apologetic manner).
We can, of course, forgive him. For just like Guinness and Brando before him, if the actor really is just phoning it in for the money in Jackson’s fabulous turn-of-the-century swords and sorcery triptych, the important thing is that only the guy whose job it was to make with the cookies (to encourage him gently but insistently on to the sound stage) would ever be able to tell.
