What Hugo Weaving Loved About Playing Red Skull Opposite Captain America

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Red Skull

When Steve Roger was injected with the Super Soldier Serum and became Captain America, he soon found himself with an an arch-nemesis: the Red Skull. In 2011's Captain America: The First Avenger, the scarlet-visaged antagonist was played by Hugo Weaving, his first comic book-related role since 2006's V for Vendetta. While Weaving has given no indication that he'll be returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he did enjoy playing Red Skull thanks to how over-the-top the villain's demeanor and appearance was.

While plugging his latest movie, The Dressmaker, with Yahoo, Hugo Weaving reminisced about some of his more notable projects, and when he reached Captain America: The First Avenger, he looked back fondly about appreciating the character's personality and look. He said:

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.

Ever since he was introduced to the comics in 1941, the Red Skull has always had one of those outrageous, tyrannical personalities, and fortunately, Hugo Weaving captured that without delving too deep into mustache-twirling territory. As for the physical look, it was always going to be difficult making Red Skull not too cartoonish, but the end result looked good...not that we would want to wear that ourselves for a long stretch of time. While you occasionally hear stories about actors not enjoying their time working on a superhero movie, it's good to hear that Weaving walked away enjoying the experience.

The last time we saw Hugo Weaving's Red Skull, he grabbed the Tesseract directly with his hand to try to control it, but this just resulted in him being disintegrated and transported through a universal portal. At first, this looked like a cut-and-dry death, but the MCU is a franchise based off a comic book world, and death is rarely permanent there. As the Yahoo article pointed out, the Tesseract, a.k.a. the Space Stone, will be brought back into play in Avengers: Infinity War, so there's a chance Red Skull could somehow be resurrected or returned to human form after Thanos gets his hands on the Infinity Stones. However, Weaving hasn't heard anything about a return, so there's no guarantee of Red Skull getting a second chance at antagonizing on the big screen.

Would you like to see Hugo Weaving reprise The Red Skull or is this a character better left behind? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

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Adam Holmes
Adam Holmes
Senior Content Producer

Connoisseur of Marvel, DC, Star Wars, John Wick, MonsterVerse and Doctor Who lore, Adam is a Senior Content Producer at CinemaBlend. He started working for the site back in late 2014 writing exclusively comic book movie and TV-related articles, and along with branching out into other genres, he also made the jump to editing. Along with his writing and editing duties, as well as interviewing creative talent from time to time, he also oversees the assignment of movie-related features. He graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in Journalism, and he’s been sourced numerous times on Wikipedia. He's aware he looks like Harry Potter and Clark Kent.