“It was his fucking day,” he says. “His private day.”
*
David Cronenberg freely admits it: “My goal was to seduce Viggo.” The director had been warned that Mortensen was choosy. So when the two men first met at the Four Seasons hotel in L.A., Cronenberg knew he’d have to appeal to more than the actor’s vanity. He launched into a discussion of the political undercurrents of the film he hoped Viggo would star in, A History of Violence.
“We talked a lot about Iraq and Bush, about where America is going, and about America’s mythology of itself,” Cronenberg recalls. “We talked about the image of a man standing alone with a gun-that if he is attacked, anything he does afterward is justified; about how much a part of America’s values that is; about how scary it becomes if that becomes the foreign policy of the country.”
Cronenberg offered Mortensen the lead role but left without hearing yes or no. Then his phone began to ring. For five days straight, Viggo called to discuss the project.
“I gradually began to realize,” Cronenberg says, “that as far as he was concerned, we were doing a movie together.”
The resulting film was nominated for a Golden Globe in the best-drama category and has done well here and overseas. While touring Europe together in support of the movie, the two developed what Cronenberg calls “our little road show,” which basically amounted to an agreement to nod earnestly no matter what came out of the other guy’s mouth. At a press conference in Madrid, Viggo pushed the limits of this pact when someone asked how it was to work with Cronenberg. “It’s actually quite horrible,” Viggo said, completely straight-faced. “He likes to humiliate and demean and is very hostile. At times we get to drink water, and sometimes we only get to drink our own urine.” The director maintained a solemn air. According to Viggo, one newspaper printed the story as fact.
In that paper’s defense, Mortensen has done things nearly that weird. His approach to acting seems borderline pathological. On the set of The Lord of the Rings, he slept for weeks in his costume, often outdoors. When he broke a tooth in a battle scene, he asked for superglue. When his car hit a rabbit, he scooped it up, roasted it, and ate it.
It’s all about connecting to basics, he says — to what’s real. Which is part of why Viggo objected so vehemently when the marketing department at New Line Cinema airbrushed his photograph on the initial promo posters for A History of Violence. Gone was the scar on his upper lip, the result of a drunken entanglement with barbed wire when he was seventeen. Gone were his wrinkles.
“It became a classic Viggo issue. He was really upset,” Cronenberg recalls, remembering how the posters were promptly changed to reflect reality. “He’s not afraid of what he is.”
*
“Stardom’s come a little late to Viggo,” says Mike Davis, a history professor at the University of California at Irvine and a good friend of Mortensen’s. They met outside the glare of Hollywood, when Davis wrote two children’s books for Perceval Press. “Having been a well regarded but not famous person for so long has immunized him.”
But since The Lord of the Rings, the devotion of Viggo’s fan base — much of it female — has ratcheted up a notch. Davis finds it a little scary.
“There seems to be a type: attractive women in their late twenties or early thirties who come up and say things like they’ve discovered the star gate,” Davis says, remembering a reading at a Santa Monica bookstore where Mortensen was mobbed by “fans out of Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust. Since I believe the ultimate trajectory of fandom is to kill and devour the celebrity deity, I wanted to hide. He didn’t flinch at all.”
Characteristically, Viggo chooses to see the upside of Websites — http://www.Viggophile.net, for example — that mention his “cute bum” and declare themselves, as one does, “the home of all things Viggolicious.” In part, he says, it is this celebrity that focuses attention on things he cares about. It can help get a movie made or boost the sales of his books, which in turn helps fund books by other authors he admires. In rare cases, it can highlight a point of view that others have sought to silence.
Great interview, good questions and a lot of room for good answers.