Image: Captain America, Marvel

Hugo Weaving was a great Nazi in Captain America: The First Avenger, playing Cap’s nemesis, Red Skull. And given that it was a comic book movie, meaning time and space are fluid—and given that any non-Loki villain has failed to really capture people’s attention—it’s natural to want Weaving back. So he’s opened the door a crack to coming back to Marvel, a studio he didn’t love working with.




Yahoo! had Weaving comment on every movie of his career:

I thought it would be a lot of fun to play a classic über-Nazi, someone who thought Hitler was a pussy! [Laughs] It was fun to play; I enjoyed the outrageousness of the German accent that I employed and I enjoyed the extraordinary mask and costume, even though it was unbelievably hot inside it. I enjoy mask work; I enjoy trying to animate masks and reveal certain things that the mask itself might not reveal. V for Vendetta was another example of that, but there was less animation within that mask versus the Red Skull.


He certainly seemed to be having a ball going that over the top. But it’s the second part of his analysis that’s interesting. There have been some pretty public blow-ups with people not wanting to work within Marvel’s fairly specific constraints. Weaving, however, seems to have come to terms with the nature of the beast:

With Marvel, it’s pretty basic stuff: accept the deal and enjoy the ride. It’s not a major stretch for an actor, but on the other hand the difficulty with the Marvel universe is maintaining a link to a human dimension within such an extraordinary, technological CGI universe. In terms of me going back and doing another one, I don’t know. I’m not sure what they’re up to with the Red Skull.

“I don’t know” is better than “no,” I guess.