The Wachowskis just love having Hugo Weaving play a bunch of dudes simultaneously in their movies, and while he won’t quite be taking over the entire world in Cloud Atlas, it does seem he’ll appear in all 6 of the stories.

If you’ve missed all the previous coverage, Cloud Atlas is an ambitious adaptation of a multi-layered novel coming from the partnership of Tom Tykwer and The Wachowskis. They’ll be tackling a book that contains 6 bifurcated stories, the first and second halves of which are told one at a time, in mirrored order (1,2,4,5,6,5,4,3,2,1). The ambition is not just tackling a story filled with so many different plots and locations, it’s that the value of the novel comes from its reflective structure, and the weaving between the 6 tales.

It will certainly be a challenge for the film to successfully translate that uniquely literary conceit, but it seems like actors appearing in multiple roles across the stories will be a part of the film’s attempt to do so. We’ve heard before that this might be an approach, but now Hugo Weaving gives us the first confirmation from an actor that he or she will be so extensively multi-casted.

“That’s a project that’s really exciting because all the actors will be playing more than one role,” Weaving says. “I actually have six characters in the same film and they are all different people in six different stories.“

Now this may not apply to the entire cast –which includes Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, and rumors of others such as Natalie Portman— but it confirms the overall approach the directing trifecta is taking.

The Harald Sun piece from which the quote above comes also goes into detail about another one of Weaving’s projects, and it sounds sadly intriguing. It focuses on one of the hundreds of English children who were told by their caretakers that they were orphans and deported to Australia with promises of a happier environment, most of which found only hard labor and abusive living conditions. Weaving plays a grown member of the group who becomes a child migrant advocate that campaigned for an apology from the two governments years later.

It’s good to know we’ll have more than just the ultra-processed voice of Weaving coming out of Megatron to look forward to from the actor before his return to Middle Earth in The Hobbit. He’s a fantastic presence in most any movie, and we certainly don’t see enough of him.

(via Collider)

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