SUBMITTED BY Fred Hill

December 27, 2005 —

Hugo Weaving took some time to talk with Dark Horizons about his upcoming projects including V for Vendetta.

Hugo Weaving, sipping a cup of tea in a Toronto dining room in the midst of this year's Toronto Film Festival, insists that it remains important for him to constantly work in his native Australia in order to feel energised. While he was here promoting the already acclaimed Little Fish for an impending North American sale, in which his harrowing portrayal of a drug addict garnered him a recent Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actor, the relaxed actor admits he's "into Australia. I guess I try to look for characters and scripts generally that appeal to me, that I immediately want to work on." While audiences will get to see a different side to the actor in the 2006 Hollywood blockbuster V for Vendetta, Weaving, star of over 40 films, says if given a choice, the smaller movie remains his preference. "Maybe it's just the way in which the filming is. I mean I do like working on smaller pictures and I feel more at home. I suppose I feel like it's more of a family unit and I think the filming rhythms are probably better for me, that you actually film faster, rather than dragging something out over months and months and months."

Weaving has always been drawn to characters far removed from his own experiences, characters such as the intense Lionel Dawson in Little Fish, a film U.S. audiences should be able to see early in 2006. "He's a long way from me but that again is something I don't necessarily think about but once the choice was made, then I thought 'Wow I've got a lot of work to do' and there was a good deal of distance to go."

Click here for the full interview.