Hugo Weaving on Love Me season two

For Hugo Weaving, the family drama Love Me belongs to an honourable tradition. “The series is quite Chekhovian in a way,” he observes. “It’s about internal states, not incidents. Not a lot happens in Chekhov: people find love, maybe fall in love with the wrong person, worry about their lives. It’s mostly about people wanting to love and people feeling, and that’s it. And it’s really lovely.”

However, there are no secluded dachas or cherry orchards, as this series proudly showcases glittering city skylines, stylish laneways and choice suburban pockets of Melbourne. “We want it to feel like a contemporary city story and to look like it could be any beautiful international city,” explains Binge’s executive producer Alison Hurbert-Burns.

An adaptation of the Swedish series Alska Mig, the award-winning 2021 first season of Love Me introduced viewers to the Mathieson family as they grappled with love and grief. Weaving’s character, Glen, began as a solicitous husband to an angrily ailing Christine (Sarah Peirse). Widowed early in the first episode, the probate solicitor was soon surprising himself and shocking his adult children, Clara and Aaron (Bojana Novakovic and William Lodder), by falling quickly and passionately in love.

By the end of the season, he’d married artist Anita (Heather Mitchell) in a joyful backyard ceremony and found that he could surrender his commitment to a traditional wedding cake without significant repercussions. Life with her was already guiding Glen into unchartered territory, with all the excitement and trepidation that accompanies such change. Anita, we discover in the soon-to-debut second season, feels no need for house insurance, a decision that horrifies her new husband.

Weaving says that he had to think through some knotty emotional tangles in order to bring Glen to a credible screen life. “He’s got to grieve, genuinely grieve, the death of his wife. But then, within two episodes, he’s not only declaring great love for someone, but saying, ‘Will you marry me?’ I wondered how I could honestly make that work and I thought that you’d have to believe that maybe Glen’s never really been in love.

“He’s a nice man, a conservative man, and he married and was dutiful in caring for his wife. He felt for her and wanted to help her, but he was also angry and embittered. There’s a sense in which her death brought grief and possibly liberation. Then he meets someone who’s genuinely lovely and falls in love with her. If we think he’s never really fallen in love before, then that’s really interesting. Then his journey, through however many seasons we do, is towards liberation, but only incrementally because he is being held back by his own nature. So you’ve got a great conflict in the character.”

Perhaps surprisingly, given Glen’s default conservatism, Weaving says, “I think he’s a clown. I don’t mean a red-nose, baggy-pants clown, but any clown figure is blinkered in some way: they can’t see certain aspects of themselves, or they’re obsessive about something. Glen’s quite obsessive about being organised; he doesn’t want things to get out of hand. But he’s in love with someone who’s a free spirit and a bit of a chaotic agent. He’s excited by her and he’s propelled into areas that he’s not naturally comfortable with. That’s both an interesting internal conflict and a place to breathe in some humour.

“I don’t want to play this for humour, but there are situations that Glen gets put into that can be very sweet because he’s reluctant to be free, but actually that’s what he wants more than anything. You wouldn’t normally think about a beta-male, a conservative man, as a clown. But that’s what I like about Glen, that he’s unexpectedly amusing and unexpectedly troubled by certain things and wants to be free of that.”

For Hugo Weaving, the family drama Love Me belongs to an honourable tradition. “The series is quite Chekhovian in a way,” he observes. “It’s about internal states, not incidents. Not a lot happens in Chekhov: people find love, maybe fall in love with the wrong person, worry about their lives. It’s mostly about people wanting to love and people feeling, and that’s it. And it’s really lovely.”

However, there are no secluded dachas or cherry orchards, as this series proudly showcases glittering city skylines, stylish laneways and choice suburban pockets of Melbourne. “We want it to feel like a contemporary city story and to look like it could be any beautiful international city,” explains Binge’s executive producer Alison Hurbert-Burns.

An adaptation of the Swedish series Alska Mig, the award-winning 2021 first season of Love Me introduced viewers to the Mathieson family as they grappled with love and grief. Weaving’s character, Glen, began as a solicitous husband to an angrily ailing Christine (Sarah Peirse). Widowed early in the first episode, the probate solicitor was soon surprising himself and shocking his adult children, Clara and Aaron (Bojana Novakovic and William Lodder), by falling quickly and passionately in love.

By the end of the season, he’d married artist Anita (Heather Mitchell) in a joyful backyard ceremony and found that he could surrender his commitment to a traditional wedding cake without significant repercussions. Life with her was already guiding Glen into unchartered territory, with all the excitement and trepidation that accompanies such change. Anita, we discover in the soon-to-debut second season, feels no need for house insurance, a decision that horrifies her new husband.

Weaving says that he had to think through some knotty emotional tangles in order to bring Glen to a credible screen life. “He’s got to grieve, genuinely grieve, the death of his wife. But then, within two episodes, he’s not only declaring great love for someone, but saying, ‘Will you marry me?’ I wondered how I could honestly make that work and I thought that you’d have to believe that maybe Glen’s never really been in love.

“He’s a nice man, a conservative man, and he married and was dutiful in caring for his wife. He felt for her and wanted to help her, but he was also angry and embittered. There’s a sense in which her death brought grief and possibly liberation. Then he meets someone who’s genuinely lovely and falls in love with her. If we think he’s never really fallen in love before, then that’s really interesting. Then his journey, through however many seasons we do, is towards liberation, but only incrementally because he is being held back by his own nature. So you’ve got a great conflict in the character.”

Perhaps surprisingly, given Glen’s default conservatism, Weaving says, “I think he’s a clown. I don’t mean a red-nose, baggy-pants clown, but any clown figure is blinkered in some way: they can’t see certain aspects of themselves, or they’re obsessive about something. Glen’s quite obsessive about being organised; he doesn’t want things to get out of hand. But he’s in love with someone who’s a free spirit and a bit of a chaotic agent. He’s excited by her and he’s propelled into areas that he’s not naturally comfortable with. That’s both an interesting internal conflict and a place to breathe in some humour.

“I don’t want to play this for humour, but there are situations that Glen gets put into that can be very sweet because he’s reluctant to be free, but actually that’s what he wants more than anything. You wouldn’t normally think about a beta-male, a conservative man, as a clown. But that’s what I like about Glen, that he’s unexpectedly amusing and unexpectedly troubled by certain things and wants to be free of that.”