Hugo Weaving loves steak, I've been told. "He's a big meat eater," is the word from his people. So the place I've booked for our lunch-time chat, Entrecote, should be perfect. It's modelled after the French chain established by Paul Gineste de Saurs in 1959, and though it's not as single-minded as them – they serve just one dish, steak, with fries and salad – the Melbourne version is similarly meaty. Perfect.
Except that as I'm lying in bed the night before we meet, reading up on all things Hugo, I stumble across a profile from 2010 containing this nugget: "When he became an ambassador for animal-rights charity Voiceless in 2004, he was still eating meat. But encouraged by his children, Harry and Holly, both vegetarians, he gave it up."
Houston, we have a problem.
Well, we might, if Weaving weren't so bloody nice.
"It's fine," he says as I blurt out an apology and he checks out the menu. "I'll have the fish."
He's not just being amenable because he's on show, either. I'd met him for the first time just a month or so before our lunch, at the memorial service for the filmmaker Paul Cox, who died in June from liver cancer.
Weaving made two films for Cox, but ended up on the cutting room floor in one of them. That didn't stop him delivering a moving and funny eulogy at the service. Afterwards, he fended my every intrusive question over beers with nothing but good grace and humour.
Today he tells me, "I can't really remember the questions".
"And I can't really remember the answers," I say. Which is at least a little bit true.
Weaving, who lives in Sydney and on a rural property near Dungog in the Hunter region, was in town this time for a screening of Proof at the Melbourne International Film Festival. The debut feature from The Dressmaker's Jocelyn Moorhouse, it's a darkly comic three-hander in which he stars with Genevieve Picot and a very young Russell Crowe; the National Film and Sound Archive has just restored it – at a cost of about $50,000 – to mark its 25th anniversary.
Weaving was eager to see it again, even if the occasion seems something of a mixed blessing. "It ages you suddenly to think you've come down to the film festival to see a restoration of your work," he chuckles. "They might like to spend a bit of money restoring me, perhaps."
At lunch at Entrecote, in Melbourne's CBD.
Proof is about Martin, a blind man who takes photographs then asks others to describe what's in them. He doesn't trust his housekeeper Celia (Picot), who suffers from a deep unrequited love for Martin, to tell him the truth, but he does trust Andy (Crowe), a young restaurant worker.
For Weaving, the film was – and remains – "hugely significant". "It was the first film script I read that I was really excited by. Australian films in the 1970s and '80s were mostly period pieces or set in the outback, and this felt entirely different – contemporary, urban, mostly interior and a fairly claustrophobic but fabulously intriguing love triangle at the heart of it. I desperately wanted to do it."
Weaving was a decade out of NIDA when Proof was released. He'd done a couple of films, but was perhaps best known for playing English cricket captain Douglas Jardine in the Bodyline miniseries for TV. Proof, which won six AFI awards in 1991, including best actor for Weaving, changed everything.
One of Weaving's first roles was as English captain Douglas Jardine in Bodyline.
"If you had to name three stepping stones in your career, that would be one of them," he says.
What are the other two?
"Hmm, I don't know. I'd have to think about that."
The Matrix?
"I suppose The Matrix would be, yeah. And then I'd probably say Little Fish, for entirely different reasons."
As Agent Smith in The Matrix, one of the "geek movies" that helped make him one of the world's highest-grossing actors.
Weaving says when Rowan Woods offered him the part in Little Fish he gave him nine DVDs of interviews he had done with people in Cabramatta, with junkies, with amputees, with former rugby league stars (Weaving's character, Lionel, is a former footballer turned heroin addict) to help prepare for the role. "So by the time we started, we all knew the world, everyone got it. That doesn't mean it was a masterpiece – that doesn't necessarily follow – but you get a greater sense of verisimilitude in character and environment, and it's not a massive outlay of money to do it that way."
Everyone I've ever spoken to about Weaving says the same thing: he's lovely, a pleasure to work with. But that doesn't mean he's a pushover. He takes the work very seriously, and he doesn't have much time for people who don't.
That's why he doesn't do TV, despite the fact there's so much hype about it being where all the best work is happening.
"I think we've got great writers but there are false economies here," he says. "You can't cut corners with scripts [but] everything is last-minute. They'll say, 'There's this great role, for you, fabulous, but we can only give you two of the six scripts [because we haven't written the others yet] and we start filming in four weeks'. Why would I say yes to that, even if the scripts are good?
"I've seen a number of series here where episode five gets bastardised and mauled to make the other eps look good – and that's honestly because they haven't nutted a lot of stuff out."
In some respects, Weaving's career is a little unusual. His tastes are distinctly European, but he has appeared in some of the biggest Hollywood franchises of the past couple of decades – The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit. He has worked all over the world, but has done just two days of filming in Los Angeles. He is rarely top billed in the big-budget films, but for a brief spell he was arguably one of the biggest box office stars in the world.
"My agent in America sent me this thing where three years running I was the biggest-grossing actor in the world," he says, revelling in the absurdity of it. "I was numero uno. 'Why doesn't this translate into my pay packet? What does this mean?' It's meaningless."
It was all down to the success of what he calls his "geek movies", the Peter Jackson component of which had him heading back to New Zealand every year for extra bits of filming.
"There are some scenes in Lord of the Rings that were filmed over four years," he says. "There are some places where you can see I'm definitely older in that shot than I am in the one before."
As the strangely ageless Elrond in Peter Jackson's seemingly endless Tolkien saga.
Weaving does plenty of theatre, but in a sense he's been on film since he was a little boy. When his parents were first married, his father was working as a seismologist for an oil company in west Africa. He took an 8mm camera on the road with him, shot what he saw and sent it back home to England, where his father would have it developed, screen it for the family, then send it back to Wallace in Africa.
As the Weaving clan grew, his father kept up the practice. "Any holiday we had he'd be filming us, that would go back to Grandpa, then it would come back to us, and we'd say, 'Oh great, rushes, rushes'," he recalls. "So I have footage of me running around the 90 Mile Beach in Gippsland as a four-year-old."
His film education began in earnest, though, at boarding school in England, where the headmaster would project the likes of Roman Polanski's Macbeth and Alfred Hitchock's North by Northwest projected in the dining hall on a Saturday night.
Weaving's great awakening came the night he saw Lindsay Anderson's If..., a chaotic fable about an uprising at a boys' school much like the one he was at.
"It was like he was saying, 'Here, boys, here are the sub-machineguns and bombs – go for it'," he laughs. "But it was a great film, still one of my favourites, and it showed me this is the world, the adult world, I'm moving into."
Weaving moved around a lot in his formative years – Melbourne, Sydney, Johannesburg, Bristol. It seems to me that a lot of actors led peripatetic lives as kids – as the offspring of military people, engineers, bankers.
"That's totally right," he says. "So as children you're being whisked away from your school to move somewhere else, possibly overseas. Your family is the constant but everything else changes. So you learn how to adapt, to fit in to a new environment, to observe, to make waves when you want to or to lie low. You learn how to be an actor.
"It doesn't mean you have to have had that experience to be an actor. But do put your daughter on the stagecoach, Mrs Worthington."
He pauses. "Whether that's good for a child's mental health is another question."
Weaving seems pretty well adjusted, though he says it is in the nature of an actor to be continually probing their own psychology. It's an essential tool for doing the work, but it becomes harder to access when you're constantly in the public eye.
"We equate celebrity with acting – and for me they're separate things," he says. "The use of celebrity to promote films, what that does to your brain…
Weaving's breakthrough role, as the blind photographer Martin Jocelyn Moorhouse's Proof.
"You're the major marketing tool for the industry you're in, and you didn't choose to be a marketing tool, you got into the industry because you saw a film as a kid and were captivated by what it said about humanity and all those wonderful things that we love in storytelling.
"So as an actor you're torn between hiding and protecting yourself as a celebrity, and being completely open as an actor when you're working. Those separate demands are probably very unhealthy, so you do get nut jobs. And I kind of get it."
Have you worked with such people?
"Probably," he says gently. "But I try not to see that in people."
Proof will screen at Cinema Nova on Sunday September 4 at 4.40pm, followed by a Q&A with Jocelyn Moorhouse, Genevieve Picot and other key creatives.
Follow Karl Quinn on facebook at karlquinnjournalist or on twitter @karlkwin
Entrecote
6 Alfred Place, Melbourne. 9654 8184
Mon-Fri midday-11pm, Saturday 4pm-11pm
