The comment is ironic, considering that in the four years since his brooding depiction of Aragorn transformed Viggo’s career, he has taken just three acting jobs — as Frank Hopkins in the 2004 man-and-his-horse epic Hidalgo; as Tom Stall, a small-town man with a big-time secret, in last year’s political parable A History of Violence; and as a seventeenth-century mercenary in the upcoming swashbuckler Alatriste. That last film, by the way, is entirely in Spanish, one of the four languages Viggo speaks. (He’s also fluent in French and Danish.)
A foreign film, Viggo? Now?
“If my interest was in being as famous as possible and making as much money as possible, then I suppose I would have done things differently,” he says, sipping his beer. “If I really wanted to make hay, this would be the time to do it. But I find I’m much too busy as it is.”
Over several hours, and later in a series of conversations, voice mails, and e-mails, Mortensen will repeat this refrain: the shortage of time, the challenge of fitting everything in. Before becoming an actor, he was a published poet, and he still carries a notebook wherever he goes “just in case a moment presents itself to be stolen.” He also paints and takes photographs, many of which have been exhibited in galleries around Los Angeles. And then there are the music and spoken-word CDs that the actor creates in collaboration with the young man he describes as his best friend-his eighteen-year-old son, Henry-and Buckethead, the reclusive, avant-garde guitarist who recently toured with a short-lived twenty-first-century incarnation of Guns N’ Roses.
In a rare phone interview that he agrees to do only because “for Viggo, I’d pretty much do whatever,” Buckethead describes their collaboration in the recording studio as an often wordless exchange.
“You know when kids play? They’re just playing and they don’t really have to talk? It’s like that, I guess. It feels right. It doesn’t feel complicated or weird. There’s no ego stuff,” says Buckethead, who is so mortified by the prospect of celebrity that he wears a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his head whenever he performs. But Viggo, he says, hasn’t been altered by fame.
“He’s never different,” the guitarist says. There’s a long silence. “He doesn’t seem like he belongs in this time.”
*
He was a man long before he was a star. Viggo has moved furniture, sold flowers on the street, even worked in a lead-smelting plant. And he’s lived all over the world. He was born in Manhattan, but his American mother and Danish father moved the family to South America when he was still in diapers. Since then he’s lived in Venezuela, Argentina, Denmark, Los Angeles, and upstate New York. “I feel at home in a lot of places,” he says.
His chiseled, wide-open face first appeared on the big screen in 1985, when he played an Amish farmer in Peter Weir’s classic Witness. Six years later, Sean Penn chose him to play an irresistible, terrifying Vietnam vet in The Indian Runner, Penn’s directorial debut. One critic said Mortensen resembled “a satanic Sam Shepard” and called the role “career-making.”
It wouldn’t be the first time Viggo would be told he had arrived — but hadn’t. In 1992, in a poem called “Edit,” he described the powerlessness that comes, at times, with being an actor. Acting, he wrote, is “a job completed for you by others in windowless rooms. . . . The man you were for one short season has been pruned, removed, to a well-groomed graveyard that smells like popcorn.” For years, he had to fight for good parts. He took a lot of bad ones, too-he was in Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III-just to work at all. Not that he’s complaining.
“Most actors can’t make any kind of living,” he says. “I’ve been lucky to make a good living for the last four years, and then for several years before that to make a living of some kind, more or less. Sometimes I ran out of money. But then I would find work. I’ve been really fortunate in that sense.”
*
It was Henry Mortensen who talked his father into taking the role of Aragorn. Viggo had never read J. R. R. Tolkien’s books. Henry had. Do it, Dad, he said. And that was that.
Great interview, good questions and a lot of room for good answers.