Originally appeared in Esquire March, 2006
Eats Roadkill, Speaks Danish.
By Amy Wallace
Viggo Mortensen listens to a lot of AM radio. The forty-seven-year-old actor doesn’t enjoy this hobby, exactly. But if the vitriol spewed by conservative talk jocks is what tens of millions of Americans listen to, he figures he ought to listen, too. He just likes to hear what’s being said.
What was being said late last summer, however, was hard for him to take. In the dead of August, Cindy Sheehan had parked her beat-up motor home on a hot, dusty road outside of Crawford, Texas, not far from George W. Bush’s family compound. The California mother and former minister wanted to talk to the president about her son, Casey, a soldier who had been killed in Iraq. So she’d set up camp in the path of Bush’s motorcade and vowed to wait him out.
To Viggo (pronounced Vee-go), Sheehan sounded like the kind of person he admires: sincere, courageous, willing to question authority. But on the AM dial, she was getting flayed. Sean Hannity cast her as a nut job, an outcast from her own family, a bad mother. Bill O’Reilly called her “a radical who does not like her country.”
Viggo has a credo he lives by: Go see for yourself if you can. So he packed a bag, flew from Los Angeles to Dallas, rented a car, and drove ninety miles to Crawford. He came alone and without warning and — as he almost always does when meeting strangers — bearing gifts: fresh vegetables, some bottled water, and a copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
You might think that Sheehan’s spirits would have been lifted by the sight of Mortensen — his vivid blue eyes, his dimpled chin, square as the end of a two-by-four, his lean-as-beef-jerky frame. Instead, she blanched.
“It was weird for her,” Viggo says now, recalling her stricken face. Only later did he learn what had spooked her: One of the last things Cindy and her son had done together was see The Return of the King, the final film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy that turned Mortensen from a supporting player into a major star. So when she saw Viggo walking toward her, for a moment she saw only Lord Aragorn, exiled heir to the throne of Gondor. And in that same moment, she felt the presence of her dead son.
“I had no idea,” Viggo says. “I just wanted to talk to her, to see what she had to say.” Besides, he adds, “I figured Bush wasn’t going to come out anytime soon, so she probably could use something to read.”
*
Viggo bursts through the swinging front door of L.A.’s oldest Irish pub around 11:30 in the morning, wearing a faded blue-and-white-striped button-down shirt and no-nonsense gray pants that a plumber might wear to unclog a drain. To his weathered green jacket he’s affixed an American-flag lapel pin and a light-blue United Nations patch the size of a plum.
When I admire the patch, Viggo reaches into his pocket and gives me one. Then he points and enunciates every syllable: “U-ni-ted Na-tions.” He giggles — a surprisingly goofy laugh that sounds more Beavis and Butt-Head than leading man — and adds, “I think it’s a good idea.”
Since 1936, Tom Bergin’s Tavern has been the kind of friendly, worn-at-the-edges place that smells like sour beer, even now, before lunch. Green cardboard shamrocks are plastered to the walls, each bearing the name of a regular. You get steak fries with your fish and chips, and there’s Guinness on tap. Viggo orders both in a voice so quiet, the waitress and I both lean forward to hear.
He has arrived carrying a laptop computer, which he is immediately sheepish about. He is something of a Luddite. He likes to be barefoot, sometimes even at fancy Hollywood functions. Until recently, when he started watching soccer, the one television in his Venice, California, home was used solely to play movies. He carries no mobile phone.
“I’ve been portrayed as a cell-phoneless savage,” he says, not unhappily. But today he’s got something to show me: galleys of several books soon to be published by Perceval Press, a small company he owns. He flips open his PowerBook G4, shrugs, and says, “Anybody can be co-opted.”
Great interview, good questions and a lot of room for good answers.