Reminding him yet again why he prefers the respectful give-and-take you get from working with giant robots, Michael Bay has once again been forced to endure the non-robot sass of one of his human actors, who continue to display an annoying tendency to have dignity and opinions whenever Michael Bay is not there to scream at them through a megaphone. This time it was Hugo Weaving, voice of the villainous Megatron, who joined Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox in dismissing his role in the Transformers franchise, probably while also failing to keep his back arched at a properly seductive angle: "I don’t regret doing it, but I very rarely do something if it’s meaningless. It was meaningless to me, honestly," Weaving told Collider of his quick voiceover gig, adding that he didn't mean this already not particularly nasty sentiment "in any nasty way."
But of course, it takes more than an assurance of no intended disrespect to prevent a Michael Bay explosion, and so the director once more took to the bully pulpit of his website to post this:
"Do you ever get sick of actors that make $15 million a picture, or even $200,000 for voiceover work that took a brisk one hour and 43 minutes to complete, and then complain about their jobs?
With all the problems facing our world today, do these grumbling thespians really think people reading the news actually care about trivial complaints that their job wasn’t “artistic enough” or “fulfilling enough”? I guess The Hollywood Reporter thinks so. What happened to people who had integrity, who did a job, got paid for their hard work, and just smiled afterward? Be happy you even have a job — let alone a job that pays you more than 98% of the people in America.
I have a wonderful idea for all those whiners: They can give their “unhappy job money” to a wonderful Elephant Rescue. It’s the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Africa. I will match the funds they donate."
"And once this connection was established, where the actors who felt less than proud about their work on Michael Bay's films began donating to wildlife charities, all the elephants were saved. And good thing, too, since we needed them to fight the giant robots."—a historian, decades from now