“V for Vendetta ”Director Shares How They Got Iconic Guy Fawkes Mask Exactly Right (Exclusive)

Meredith WilshereSun, November 1, 2026 at 1:59 PM UTC

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Hugo Weaving in ‘V for Vendetta’Credit: Moviestore/Shutterstock -

James McTeigue says the Guy Fawkes mask’s texture and lighting gave it different expressions throughout V for Vendetta

The director was surprised that the mask became a symbol in political movements

V for Vendetta returns to select theaters for its 20th anniversary on Nov. 1 and Nov. 5

The iconic Guy Fawkes mask had to be perfect for V for Vendetta to work.

While reflecting on the film’s 20th anniversary, director James McTeigue tells PEOPLE that “what makes the film timeless and live on is the mask.”

“I don’t think anyone had any idea that that’s what would happen, that it would be used in various political movements,” he shares.

McTeigue, 58, believes that it “happened because people got what the mask was about, that there is more power in ‘we’ than there is in ‘I.’ “

To make the film work, McTeigue knew the mask needed to be exactly right, as it would be the film’s defining image.

Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving in ‘V for Vendetta’Credit: Moviestore/Shutterstock

“What I wanted to do making a film was make the mask have a character unto itself. Obviously there’s V beneath the mask, or whoever that person is, and Hugo Weaving playing the character,” he explains.

“It needed to have more texture, so the light operated on it in different ways; you could make it look sinister or you could make it look suspicious or you could make it look benevolent or you could make it look creepy if you wanted to,” he says of the mask.

“I did a range of lighting tests,” he continues, noting that he used different lighting as a “tool, depending on what the scene was, to give different expressions to the mask whenever I wanted to do it.”

“With the art department and the [director of photography], we did tests, and then I used that throughout the film in different ways to give the mask a different personality depending on what the scene was,” he adds.

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Twenty years later, he believes “that’s what has made the film live on, and that’s why we’re talking about it now, because it has this mask that is timeless, and the film is timeless in a way because we go through these political cycles all the time throughout history.”

“You can watch the film now and hold it up to the political cycle we’re in and just go, ‘Oh, that seems like it’s close to what’s happening,’” he says.

V for Vendetta follows Portman’s Evey, a woman living in a dystopian society who meets a freedom fighter plotting to overthrow their tyrannical government. The thriller is based on Alan Moore’s graphic novel of the same name.

Hugo Weaving in ‘V for Vendetta’Credit: Moviestore/Shutterstock

While the film “was very political in some ways,” McTeigue notes that “on its surface, it’s a superhero movie.”

“It’s an anti-superhero movie. It has a lot of questions about what is right and wrong in politics. It has lots of questions about the morality of terrorism,” he says. “There are sort of lofty things to try to discuss in a superhero movie. But it was also like the genius of the graphic novel that was adapted.”

Ultimately, the director hopes the movie remains “timeless in the way that I made it in 2006, you can go and see the movie in 2026 and see how it resonates culturally and in society still.”

“I’m sure that, if you see it in 2036 or 2046, it’ll probably still be the same; no matter when you come to the movie, you can see what’s happened in history and what’s gonna happen in the future,” he shares. “The film speaks to that, hopefully, in a succinct way. That was what I was mindful of when I was making it. There’s a joy of cinema in it, too.”

Tickets for V for Vendetta‘s 20th anniversary are available now online and at participating theater box offices. For more information, please visit FathomEntertainment.com.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”