Celebrity Biographies
Viggo Mortensen
“If with my life or my death I can protect you, so I will,” said Aragorn in one of the key sequences of The Lord of the Rings . JRR Tolkien himself would not have imagined a guy as suitable to play the character on screen as Viggo Mortensen, by then practically unknown, despite the fact that he had taken part in some thirty films. He played the role of him so well that even some hot-headed moviegoers forgive him for having had the audacity to intervene in two unnecessary remakes of Hitchcock films, Perfect Crime and Psycho , both from 1998.
His life-forged tough appearance, six feet tall, seems to contradict that he is a particularly sensitive person, who excels in other artistic attitudes apart from acting. He put out a book of poetry before he was famous and three jazz records. He organizes exhibitions with his photographs, and as if all this were not enough, he really painted the frescoes of his character, in the aforementioned Perfect Crime .
He boasts to the four winds of not having a TV, and he is an exemplary father who always demands under contract that Thanksgiving be reserved to be with his son.
The son of a Dane and an American whom he met in Norway, Viggo Mortensen was born on October 20, 1958, in New York. His father, Viggo Sr., had a restless and wandering spirit, a character that his son would inherit. For many years the family was changing location, going from Argentina to Venezuela and Denmark. At the age of eight, Viggo appeared in a school play, as part of a dragon’s tail, although at that time he did not even consider dedicating himself to acting.
His parents’ divorce turns his adolescence into hell. He returns to New York, where he lives with his mother and takes up photography, a hobby he continues to do today. At St. Lawrence University he graduated in Political Science and Spanish Literature. He hadn’t planned to go into acting, but when he graduated, he chanced upon an ad in the newspaper looking for actors for a theater company. After a monologue in which he played Jack the Ripper, he decided to continue dedicating himself to acting, to see if he had any luck.
He falls for a little job, like playing a young Amish farmer in Sole Witness , or a small role in The Purple Rose of Cairo , which ended up on the editing table. In a very low budget movie, titled Salvation! , which was not even released in Spain, he met Exene Cervenka, a singer from a punk band, with whom he fell in love, especially because they shared a love of poetry. In 1987, the same year that he moved to Los Angeles to be closer to the film industry, Viggo married Cervenka, who shortly after gave birth to Henry Blake, the couple’s only child. The boy is also going to be an actor, since he played the young rider of Rohan in The Two Towers. “Becoming a father was the most important event of my life, and what put me on the right track,” recalls the actor. He was not doing as well as in his personal life in the cinema, because although he did not lack roles, most of his films were of very low quality, such as Presidio or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 .
His luck changed at the beginning of the 90s, since he played one of the leading brothers in Strange Blood Bond , by Sean Penn . From that moment on, they offer him roles of unequal importance, in projects that would have some impact, such as Crimson Tide , Portrait of a Lady , Lieutenant O’Neil and 28 Days . He even took advantage of his command of Spanish to come to our country to shoot My Brother’s Gun , by Ray Loriga. His face was beginning to be known by moviegoers, but his popularity resisted him, without losing sleep over it. “I don’t have a deliberate plan in life, I don’t even know if I should dedicate myself more to photography than acting. In any case, the real success is at work. Traveling with hope is much better than arrival”, commented the actor.
When Peter Jackson started filming The Lord of the Rings, interviewed among others Viggo Mortensen for the character of Aragorn, but ended up giving the role to Stuart Townsend. Once the first clapperboard was given, the New Zealand filmmaker realized that this actor did not fit his conception of the character. So he ended up hiring Mortensen, who joined the shoot in progress. This last-minute substitution made him a star, without even being the protagonist of the trilogy. With the heir to the throne of Gondor, Mortensen shared his love for nature, and to be even more similar he went to sleep in the middle of the forest, dressed as a mountaineer. Although it is probably a rumor, it is said that he went everywhere with his sword, even to restaurants, and that he once ran over a rabbit, and roasted it on a campfire to eat it in the style of his character.
It is said that it is even more difficult to maintain stardom than to achieve it. At the moment, Mortensen seems to be calmly choosing his next projects, and they offer him characters very similar to Aragorn’s. This is what happened with the adventurer Frank Hopkins, from Oceans of Fire (Hidalgo) , his only work after Tolkien’s trilogy.
As for the future, it seems almost confirmed that he will return to Spain to play Captain Alatriste, in the adaptation of the adventures of the famous character created by Pérez Reverte, an ambitious production currently being prepared by Agustín Díaz Yanes .