V for Vendetta director James McTeigue thinks it’s “amazing,” the way that the Guy Fawkes mask from his 2006 movie has taken on a life of its own. “When you make a film, you hope that it might seep into the culture at some point,” he tells Consequence on the eve of its upcoming Fathom Events re-release. “That’s like your craziest, wildest dream, that people will be talking about your film 20 years later.”
While the smirking, mustachioed mask is often associated with modern protests and resistance movements, the origins of the Guy Fawkes mask go even further back in history than writer Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd’s original comic series and graphic novel from the ’80s. The real-life Guy Fawkes was part of a group of Catholics who, feeling repressed by their anti-Catholic government, aimed to blow up the House of Lords (the famous “gunpowder plot”) on November 5th, 1606. Fawkes was captured and executed before he could complete his role in detonating the explosives, and November 5th became a national holiday in Britain, traditionally celebrated with bonfires.
The idea of children dressing up as Fawkes first emerged in the late 18th century, evolving into variations on the iconic mask getting public distribution decades later. The definitive design of the Guy Fawkes mask, though, came from V for Vendetta artist Lloyd. The serialized comic book story that would eventually become the hit film began publishing in 1982, the mask’s history informing the choices of its central character.
In the 2006 movie, the face of V, played by Hugo Weaving, is never seen — he only wears the famous mask. This created serious limitations for Weaving, since as McTeigue notes, “you don’t see the eyes. That’s the difference from Batman. It’s just this completely malleable face, and you can read into it what you want.”
The movie’s design differed slightly from the graphic novel’s version, including some more textural detail in the goatee and eyebrows, and cheeks that were a little less ruddy. McTeigue describes his hope that it would work on screen as “blind faith,” considering that “it’s hard for an actor if you take away their face — you know, the thing that they’ve been working with for 30 or 40 years. But Hugo Weaving really got that it was about the physicality, and it was about the voice.”
Additionally, McTeigue put a lot of work into exploring ways to make sure that the mask could take on different moods: “I did a bunch of lighting tests — lighting it in different ways so it could be benevolent, it could be vicious, it could be suspicious, all these different things. What does he look like lit from below, or from this side? What if one side’s completely dark? So by the time I got to film with it, depending on the overriding feeling I wanted in the scene, I could light the mask in the way I wanted. I would go, ‘Okay, let’s make him look sinister,’ so you’d light him from below. And when Evie comes out and tells the story of her parents, he’s very flatly lit, so he looks like he’s your grandfather you could have a nice chat to.”
To enable that, there were variations of the mask that featured different finishes — some were highly glossed, and some were more matte in texture. “The gloss makes him feel like he’s very close to you, and the matte makes you feel like he’s a little ways away from you, and the light is sucking into it a little more,” explains McTeigue. “The way his hair fell sometimes, too, I’d mess with that as well.”
The result is a movie that still feels shockingly relevant today, with broader ramifications for the rest of the world. Plenty of people had read the graphic novel, but McTeigue credits the influence of film as a medium on spreading awareness of the mask: “That film was number one at the box office, in America and overseas, when it came out. It was now exposed to millions and millions of people. And I think more importantly, people got what the mask was about, which was that there’s more power in ‘we’ than there is in ‘I.'”
Additionally, protestors realized that the mask allowed them to remain anonymous, increasingly important as facial recognition software became widespread in the 21st century. “The Arab Spring got it, Occupy Wall Street got it, the Hong Kong protestors got it. Even the people protesting Scientology, which was the first time I saw it used as a form of protest, they got it,” McTeigue says, “and that made the mask live on and made the film live on as well. And so, yeah, now it’s completely seeped into the cultural vernacular.”
The mild irony of this, especially for hacktivist protest groups like Anonymous, is that the mask’s origins in a comic series that eventually became a DC Comics property means that the design is owned by a corporation: Specifically, Warner Bros. gets a cut of every Lloyd-designed Guy Fawkes mask sold, and as of October 2026, David Ellison’s Skydance empire is the current owner of that copyright.
V for Vendetta (Warner Bros., courtesy of Fathom Entertainment)
This doesn’t diminish its power as a form of protest, or the movie’s legacy as an early example of how powerful comic book adaptations can be. “You have to remember, this is before the superhero saturation that we have now,” McTeigue says. “This is pre-the first Iron Man. Batman Begins had come out, but before that, it was the Tim Burton Batmans and the Supermans, which were very pop.”
As a result, her says, “V for Vendetta was really before its time in a lot of ways, because it was an anti-superhero movie. Here’s this guy on this vengeful tear against the state, and all the people who had done him wrong, and the film is asking, at its core, ‘What’s the morality of terrorism?’ It’s a lofty thing to make a film about. You’re also trying to make it accessible, so there’s, the action set pieces and gunfights and blowing stuff up — all the things that might be popcorn entertainment. But there’s lots of other ideas underneath the surface of it.”
And those ideas live on today — no small thanks to that mask.
V for Vendetta returns to theaters for its 20th anniversary on November 1st and 5th, thanks to Fathom Entertainment. Visit the Fathom website for tickets and more information.