Hugo Weaving And Paul Bettany Reveal Just How Little Effort They Put Into Voice Acting On TRANSFORMERS And IRON MAN
At this year’s Oscars, Chris Rock spent a few minutes before announcing the Best Animated Feature award joking about how ridiculous voice over work is in Hollywood. Take a look below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWsge7BtzQg
Hysterical on one end, but today we have two examples of exactly what Rock was describing from two of the biggest franchises of the decade!
The first example comes from actor Hugo Weaving, who voiced the character of Megatron in all three TRANSFORMERS films. Despite Weaving being one of the most dedicated performers in his field today, he admitted that when it came to those films, he just didn’t care in the least:
“It was one of the only things I’ve ever done where I had no knowledge of it, I didn’t care about it, I didn’t think about it,” the English actor said. “They wanted me to do it. In one way, I regret that bit. I don’t regret doing it, but I very rarely do something if it’s meaningless. It was meaningless to me, honestly. I don’t mean that in any nasty way. I did it.”
Weaving said that during his time working on the trilogy, he never even met director Michael Bay, and didn’t even bother to read anything besides his own lines:
“But, my link to that and to Michael Bay is so minimal. I have never met him,” he continued. “I was never on set. I’ve seen his face on Skype. I know nothing about him, really. I just went in and did it. I never read the script. I just have my lines, and I don’t know what they mean. That sounds absolutely pathetic! I’ve never done anything like that, in my life. It’s hard to say any more about it than that, really.”
But Weaving isn’t the only actor to not read his script. In a new interview with Digital Spy, British actor Paul Bettany admits that even though he provided the voice of Tony Stark’s super computer, J.A.R.V.I.S., in the IRON MAN films, he has yet to see either movie, or even read an entire script!
‘They don’t send me the whole script so I have no idea what the movies are about.’
The 41-year-old actor says that he almost feels like a crook for the small amount of work he did, seemingly mimicking Rock’s points in the process:
“I feel like a pirate. This is robbery. I walk in, I say some lines on a piece of paper for two hours, and then they give me a bag of money and I leave and I go about my day…I sort of feel guilty, because at least acting can be exhausting, with long hours… but I do nothing! And I’ve never seen one of them.”
Makes you think a bit, doesn’t it?