This dog was not Brigit.
I look up from the computer screen, expecting to see grief on his face, or at least a serious expression. Instead, he is smiling absurdly. “It was sad,” he says. “But it was funny.”
*
Back in 2004, under the headline ACTOR’S POLITICS POLLUTE RING, the conservative film critic Michael Medved attacked Viggo in USA Today, ripping into him for his “pacifist preening.” Viggo defended himself, pointing out that he’d talked about the political meaning of The Lord of the Rings only after Richard Corliss of Time magazine suggested — wrongly, Viggo felt — that the Fellowship stood for “Western democracies now besieged by the lunatic faction of Islamic fundamentalism.”
Back at Tom Bergin’s Tavern, we talk about patriotism. He touches the American-flag pin on his lapel. When he went to meet Sheehan, he says, he stopped at one of the many shops in Crawford devoted “to Bush and all things Bush.” It was there that he spotted a big cardboard display of dozens of flag pins. He bought every one.
“I found out that anyone can wear one of these things,” he says with mock surprise, handing me yet another gift.
Is he trying to take back some of the American symbols to which conservatives have laid claim? He nods.
But for the next six weeks, he will edit and recompose his thoughts about the flag and its meaning.
“All irony aside,” he writes me at one point, “one of the most effective tools that the Cheney-Bush junta has used to marginalize dissenting or even mildly inquisitive American citizens has been the accusation of being unpatriotic. . . . Saying you are a patriot does not make you one; wearing a flag pin does not in itself mean anything at all.”
Later, he calls to clarify: “What matters is how we are, what we say and do-not what we wear.”
But my favorite explication comes in the form of a voice mail.
“Hey, it’s Viggo. I’m on the road, as usual,” he tells my answering machine. He sounds tired. “You said something about ‘taking it back’ — the flag. And I don’t look at it as taking it back. It’s always been there. But the way it’s been used symbolically is that you’re either with us or against us. There’s no middle ground. It seems to fly in the face of what the country is supposedly about.”
He sighs. “So you were right,” he concludes. “But I wouldn’t put it that way.”
*
“Do we have time for a beer?” Viggo asks. We’re done eating, done talking, halfway out the tavern door. He asks the bartender for the time: 3:45 P.M. Henry will be home soon. A beer will take too long.
He orders two shots of Jameson’s, one for each of us. “You don’t have to finish it,” he says sweetly, throwing his back.
Out in the parking lot, he stops at his truck — a black pickup he’s borrowed from one of his brothers — to retrieve a final present: a red rubber bracelet memorializing fallen firefighters. He hands it to me, then says goodbye.
I’m right behind him, waiting to pull into traffic, when he jumps out and motions for me to roll down my window. There’s something interesting on the radio, he says, urging me to turn it on. I can hear it coming from his speakers. It’s AM talk, and it’s playing loud.
—
This article originally appeared in Esquire Magazine.
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.
Great interview, good questions and a lot of room for good answers.