Celebrity recollections #5
Career film critics often have an encyclopaedic knowledge of their subject. They are the sort of folks who know exactly what Mick says in the famous Crocodile Dundee knife scene, can rattle off Clark Gable’s entire filmography without consulting IMDb, and can spell out every obscure homage to action movies in Hot Fuzz.
While I have a pretty good grasp of what makes a film work (story, dialogue, tone, cinematography, etc.) and a mostly useless talent for remembering what year a movie was made, I have never been one of the abovementioned anoraks. So whenever a publicist dropped a last-minute interview on me, it exposed the gaps in my knowledge and I would have to scramble to try and plug them before I spoke to the actor.* Never did this deficiency prove more embarrassing than the time I interviewed Hugo Weaving.
This was in the early 2000s, when the Matrix movies were the hottest thing in cinema. Weaving, you’ll recall, played the bad guy of the piece, Agent Smith, and it was a pretty good get for my little DVD magazine. Our phone interview was going well until I prefaced a question by mentioning that Weaving had appeared in the 1993 Australian film Bad Boy Bubby.
“No, that wasn’t me,” he interrupted. “That was Nicholas Hope. It’s actually quite a common mistake.”
I apologised profusely and wondered if it was possible to bash myself to death with the phone receiver. Weaving was nice enough about my humiliating error, but for months afterwards I cringed whenever I thought about it.
They do look sort of alike, I guess. Can’t imagine David Stratton or Leonard Maltin making that sort of goof, though, huh? Oh, well.
* I once had to interview Sophie Monk about Date Movie (2006) even though I had not seen a preview of the film and only vaguely knew who Monk was from her time on the talent show Popstars. During the interview she alluded to a scene with a gold bikini and I just had to nod and smile and pretend I knew what the devil she was going on about. When I finally saw that scene years later, I hoped to God I hadn’t nodded and smiled too much.