To that end, he dedicated his latest CD, Intelligence Failure, to Cindy Sheehan, whose voice is among many (including Bush’s, Condoleezza Rice’s, Dick Cheney’s, and, of course, Henry’s) that are spliced together into a critique of the Iraq war. Sheehan hasn’t heard it yet, but she says she’s “honored and overwhelmed” to be included.
I reach Sheehan in mid-December, almost two years after she and her son saw Return of the King, on Christmas Day 2003. “It was a surprise,” she says of Viggo’s visit to Camp Casey. “Very few people like Viggo came out. It was mostly ordinary Americans.”
Sheehan stresses, as does Mortensen, that support of regular people is more important than that of movie stars. Still, for the actor “to come and tell me, ‘Thank you and keep up the good work’ — it does help me go on. That’s for sure,” she says.
It was a short meeting; they talked for only about twenty minutes. Then Viggo took his leave, explaining that he had to fly back to California that same day. Sheehan recalls being struck by the reason he gave: “He said he had to go pick up his son from school.”
*
Viggo and I are talking about sex.
I’ve asked him about his forceful love scene with Maria Bello in A History of Violence. In the scene, an argument between husband and wife morphs suddenly into rough, bruising sex on the stairs of their bucolic farmhouse. Some have described it as rape, a suggestion that makes both Mortensen and Cronenberg wince. But not since Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland went to bed in the 1970s thriller Don’t Look Now has married sex looked so complicated, so urgent, and so real.
Ask any movie-loving woman to name the sexiest scenes on film and, after ticking off the old standbys-Dennis Quaid getting Ellen Barkin off in The Big Easy, Kevin
Costner painting Susan Sarandon’s toenails in Bull Durham-chances are good that she’ll pull out her well-worn copy of the 1999 indie sleeper A Walk on the Moon. In it, Mortensen plays a hippie who rocks Diane Lane’s straitlaced world, and when he seduces her under a waterfall, gently but persistently transforming her reluctance into hunger, it is hot as hell.
Viggo says the History of Violence scene transcends lust because it’s “about more than just the physical. It’s about jockeying for position. All relationships are. Even when they’re going well.”
It’s irresistible, after a comment like that, to try to shift the topic to Viggo’s love life. “I don’t talk about my personal shit,” he says. “When I go out of my way to be open, then I fucking regret it.”
The closest I can get to the subject is this:
Me: We have to talk about women, because you are the sexiest man alive.
Him: So there are a lot of dead men who are sexier?
Me: Yes, you are surpassed many times over by dead men. How does that affect your relationships?
Him: Not much.
I try again: How is it to be every woman’s fantasy? “For some people, that would be like, ‘Great! That’s half the reason I got into this!’ But to me, that’s not exciting. It’s someone looking at you and not seeing who you are on most levels. You become some possession to have.
Eager to change the subject, he passes me the PowerBook and invites me to read an essay about his late dog that will soon be published in Linger, a collection of his writings and photographs. “Letter to Brigit” tells of his melancholy drive last summer to deliver the frozen body of his fifteen-year-old mutt to a San Fernando Valley crematorium. After retrieving Brigit from the vet where she’d been put down, he headed north on the 405 with her bagged and sealed in blue plastic in the backseat. He was crying. Suddenly, the push and pull of rush-hour traffic forced him to jam on the brakes, sending Brigit hurtling to the floor. He eased the car to a stop on the shoulder and, for the first time, looked in the bag.
“We had taken your collar off,” he wrote. “I knew that Henry was wearing it wrapped twice around his wrist as a bracelet.” But this dog had a collar, he saw now.
Great interview, good questions and a lot of room for good answers.