If you ask Michael Bay, actors can be so holier-than-thou sometimes.
The Hollywood director took to his website yesterday to hit back at Hugo Weaving—though without singling the latter out by name—for calling his voice-over role as Megatron in Bay's Transformers trilogy "meaningless."
"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?" wrote the filmmaker in a scathing post (which has since aparently been removed). "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'?"
Bay appeared to be taking offense to Weaving's disparaging of his special effects-heavy blockbuster in a recent interview the thesp did with Collider in which he said Transformers "was one of the only things I've ever done where I had no knowledge of it, I didn't care about it, I didn't think about it."
"I don't regret doing it, but I very rarely do something if it's meaningless. It was meaningless to me, honestly," said Weaving. "I don't mean that in any nasty way. I did it."
He might not have meant any harm, but clearly the director, whom Weaving confessed he never even met on the job, wasn't having any of it.
"What happened to people who had integrity, who did a job, got paid for their hard work, and just smiled afterward?" wondered Bay, before adding sternly, "Be happy you even have a job—let alone a job that pays you more than 98% of the people in America."
The Armageddon mastermind then offered up a challenge to "all those whiners:" donate all their "unhappy job money" to an elephant rescue program run by the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Africa, and if they did, Bay promised to match it.
What say you, Hugo? A rep for Weaving could not be reached for comment.