Anthony Jared Zerbe is an award-winning American actor who was born on May 20, 2936. To the fans of The Matrix, he is also known as Councillor Hamann, one of the twelve senior members of the Zion Council.
His first appearance is in The Matrix Reloaded with subsequent roles in The Matrix Revolutions and even the games Enter and Matrix and The Matrix: Path of Neo. Councillor Hamann looks and talks like a wise man, considering his first eleven years in the Matrix as a waste of time, when all he did was sleep (which is literally true, as his body was in sleep mode in the human power plant): “I figure I slept the first 11 years of my life, now I’m making up for it.”
At the beginning of Reloaded, he meets Neo on the corridors of Zion – both of them were out of their steel rooms as they could not sleep -, and have a conversation about what control really is and the importance of letting people do what they’re best at.
This is neatly stated while the two of them are on the engineering level, looking down on all the machines that sustained life in Zion: “There is so much in this world that I do not understand. See that machine? It has something to do with recycling our water supply. I have absolutely no idea how it works. But I do understand the reason for it to work. I have absolutely no idea how you are able to do some of the things you do, but I believe there’s a reason for that as well. I only hope we understand that reason before it’s too late.”
Councillor Hamann and Neo
Councillor Hamann is one of the few characters who has blind faith in Neo and, when the time comes, he supports Neo by letting Morpheus take the Nebuchadnezzar and enter the Matrix where Neo had one last chat with the Oracle. When confronted about this decision by Commander Lock – who is in charge of Zion’s defense forces – the Councilor says: “Because I believe our survival depends on more than how many ships we have.”
My intertextual study The Matrix and the Alice Books looks at the way Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have influenced some of the ideas put forth by Andy and Larry Wachowski. The book is now available as a Kindle ebook too.
