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Hugo Weaving Reveals Why He Turned Down Reprising Red Skull & Won’t Be in The Matrix 4
Hugo Weaving has played iconic roles in the MCU and in the Matrix trilogy, and has now expressed why he didn’t and won’t come back for either franchise, respectively. Weaving played Red Skull in Captain America: The First Avenger but didn’t come back to play the character when he was the guardian of the Soul Stone in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, and he says it was due to financial negotiations falling through.
“Oh, yeah. I loved playing that character Red Skull – it was a lot of fun,” Weaving told Yahoo. “We were all obliged to sign up for three pictures: I was thinking [Red Skull] probably wouldn’t come back in Captain America but he may well come back as a villain in The Avengers. By then, they’d pushed back on the contracts that we agreed on and so the money they offered me for The Avengers was much less than I got for the very first one, and this was for two films. And the promise when we first signed the contracts was that the money would grow each time. They said: ‘It’s just a voice job, it’s not a big deal.’ I actually found negotiating with them through my agent impossible. And I didn’t really wanna do it that much. But I would have done it.”
Weaving was replaced with Ross Marquand for the role in the two Avengers films. Weaving also talked about not returning for The Matrix 4, noting that it was simply a scheduling issue.
“The Matrix is a very different story,” he said. “It’s unfortunate but actually I had this offer [for The Visit onstage in London] and then the offer came from The Matrix, so I knew it was happening but I didn’t have dates. I thought [I] could do both and it took eight weeks to work out that the dates would work – I held off on accepting [a role in The Visit during that time]. I was in touch with Lana Wachowski, but in the end she decided that the dates weren’t going to work. So we’d sorted the dates and then she sort of changed her mind. They’re pushing on ahead without me.”