SUBMITTED BY Fred Hill

February 27, 2006 —

Hugo Weaving sat down with JoBlo to talk about filming V for Vendetta and many other topics about the film.

So start out by talking about the challenges of working within a mask, the entire film? Was the mask ever off V?

Yeah, actually funnily enough V impersonates a couple of other characters as well in the story and so the first three days shooting I was not in a mask which was actually a good introduction to everyone on set and also working as V playing another character. But the challenges of working in a mask, it's a very fixed mask, so it's a completely fixed expression which you can change by certain angles of the head and by movement and also by lighting, so it's not actually an actors challenge so it's actually a challenge that is faced by the art dept. who created the mask, the actor himself, the director in the choice of how it's going to cover the mask, and also the DOP in the way it's going to be lit for a particular scene, so it's a collaborative challenge.

So the main challenge for me is he is very fixed, and yet he talks a lot and he's on film, so in the book you can read him, but you're not looking at his face and so you can take that character in on the page, but on screen, (mumbles) that's the challenge.

He doesn't have a name, he doesn't have much of a back-story beyond his experience in the can, if you wanted to build the performance from the inside out, it's like there's nothing on the inside.

Particularly if you're asked to do something within a few days and then you fly half-way around the world, you don't have the time to really get into the skin of the character, but I've decided very early on for me, that it's a technical exercise but I wasn't going to get engaged with the problems of the mask at all I was just going to try and solve them. and help to sort of make that mask work. Yeah, the other thing is he's an idea anyway, yes, yes, he's a human being but you never find out who he is. The writers of the piece have never really expressed exactly who he is, so I certainly cannot go there either.

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