Features
West January 05, 2004

Good Fellow

By Jamie Painter Young
Photo By: Jamie Painter Young

Viggo Mortensen walks into the Grove movie theatres at Third and Fairfax in
Los Angeles, approaches the concession stand, and orders a Coke. He's about
to speak to a packed house of fans, many of them actors, who are being
treated to an advance screening of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the
King, the final installment in Peter Jackson's wildly successful gamble at
adapting J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved novels to the big screen. Amazingly not a
single patron in the lobby seems to recognize him. Maybe it's because his
hair is cropped short, his face is clean-shaven, there's not a sign of
Middle Earth grunge or weaponry to be found on him, and he's wearing a dark
gray suit instead of leather and metal. Or maybe it's because he doesn't
act like a movie star, even when he clearly is one.

The low-key but talented actor has mixed feelings about his sudden success
after 21 years of working mainly under the radar. He's grateful, of course,
for the opportunity to play the enigmatic warrior Aragorn in The Lord of
the Rings, and, as he'll tell you, the experience of shooting the epic
trilogy in New Zealand over four years was awesome and inspiring, even when
he and his fellow cast and crew were beyond the point of exhaustion. But
Mortensen finds it uncomfortable to have to safeguard his privacy now, and
he's ambivalent about his star status. As he explains, he never chased
fame. He chased doing good work.

Stick With It

"I don't know why [I became an actor]," says Mortensen, who began to pursue
his career in New York, where he was born and spent his early childhood. "I
went from watching plays and movies as just looking at them as
entertainment and something you could talk about afterwards to starting to
wonder how it was done. When I would see a really seamless, fully realized
performance or an ensemble performance, I would wonder, How did they do
that? How did they make it so effortless? In order to find out, I started
to study acting and, to be honest, I don't know why I stuck with it,
because it took me a long time before I made a living. I suppose if I had
known what it would be like and how much frustration would be involved,
maybe I wouldn't have, but it's like life: You can quit, or you can keep
going. You can become bitter, or you can stay open. It's kind of up to you.
I guess I stayed interested enough in the work, and I got some encouragement."

His initial encouragement came from an acting teacher in New York, Warren
Robertson, with whom Mortensen remains in touch. "Warren saw something in
what was probably rough work and saw enough to encourage me to keep trying
and to keep auditioning and so forth, and eventually somebody saw me do
something and started sending me out on auditions," tells the actor. "I had
initially very good luck. I immediately tested for several leads right
away, but I had no idea what I was doing."

As Mortensen advises young actors, you can't coast on your looks and some
raw instincts to truly sustain a career. You have to hone your craft. You
also have to stick around for the long haul and believe in yourself when
few others do. Mortensen, now 45 and all too familiar with the frustration
that actors go through, has spent two decades trying to solve the puzzle
that is acting. He's come to appreciate that it's a puzzle that can never
be completely solved. That is what he enjoys most about acting.

"If there's anything in my favor, it's the fact that I remain curious about
the craft of acting and I'm interested in improvement from job to job, from
day to day, from scene to scene," he says. "I mean, on every job I do, and
that I'm lucky to get, there's always some point, or many points, at which
I'm at a loss for how to get through a scene. What you learn to do after a
while is to relax and to just kind of let something happen."

Do It Justice

Perhaps he's not giving himself enough credit. Mortensen pours himself into
his work, researching his roles in detail when appropriate, and immersing
himself in as many facets of his character as he can discover. He prides
himself on being prepared when the cameras roll. Indeed he initially turned
down the offer to play Aragorn for that reason.

"I didn't think I would do justice to it. There was not enough time to
prepare, and I like to do all I can to prepare as much as possible.
Especially if you're in three movies in a row, you should know what you're
talking about. I didn't want to be the one guy that when you saw the movie
you'd say, 'Well, it was pretty well done, but that one guy didn't seem to
know the story he was in,'" explains the actor, who fortunately
reconsidered and accepted the offer. "In the end, I realized that it would
be too interesting a challenge to pass up. I would have regretted not
accepting this, not because I knew it was going to be done so well-because
nobody knew that it would work."

Mortensen was also coming into the production as the second actor to be
cast as Aragorn. Irish actor Stuart Townsend, then 26 years old, had
originally been cast to play the reluctant hero in the Tolkien series, but
was let go after four days of shooting because Jackson realized Townsend
was too youthful to convey the sense of wisdom and world-weariness needed
for Aragorn. As Jackson was quoted as saying in a recent Associated Press
story, "We had to make a very hard decision very quickly [about letting
Townsend go], without having anyone else cast."

Shares Mortensen, "I've never been in this position, and I hope that I'm
not in that position again where I'm replacing another actor... I did write
[Townsend] a letter when I got to New Zealand, expressing my belief--that I
still think is true--that maybe in about 10 years, or when he's as old as I
am now, or as old as I was when I started [the project], that he would be
perfect for the part. It was a mutual agreement between him and the
filmmakers that a mistake had been made, and it would have been unfair to
him to be an actor who was the same age as were the actors playing the
Hobbits and Legolas [Orlando Bloom]. Aragorn was a wizened 87-1/2-years
old. They needed to find some old guy, and so they did."

OK, so they found someone half that age. But ask Mortensen why he thinks he
got the part, and he's stumped--or maybe just too modest to say. "I don't
know why Peter Jackson called me," he said. "He probably ran out of
options. But then that's what you do with opportunity I suppose. You make
the most of it."

For two decades, Mortensen has been making the most of whatever part he's
been cast in, no matter the size or quality of the production. After
working in New York theatre for a few years, he made his film debut as an
Amish farmer in the 1985 Harrison Ford movie Witness. He eventually moved
to Los Angeles, married musician Exene Cervenka--the lead singer of the
rockabilly--punk band X, whom he divorced in 1997 and with whom has a
15-year-old son --and spent the next decade working in relative obscurity
as an actor, building a mixed resume of credits that include Leatherface:
Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Young Guns II, Carlito's Way, American Yakuza,
The Passion of Darkly Noon, The Prophecy, Albino Alligator, and, most
notably, the little-seen, but well-regarded Sean Penn--directed The Indian
Runner. Then in the mid-to-late 1990s, casting directors and directors
began to tap him for bigger projects, including Crimson Tide, Jane
Campion's Portrait of a Lady, G.I. Jane, A Perfect Murder opposite Gwyneth
Paltrow, as Diane Lane's love interest in A Walk in the Clouds, and 28 Days
with Sandra Bullock.

Victoria Burrows, the casting director on The Lord of the Rings trilogy,
can be thanked for rescuing Mortensen from the limited category of "leading
lady's hunk." Burrows told BSW, "I've been involved with Viggo's career a
few times, but he was just special from Day One. We did [the 1997 Fox TV
movie] Vanishing Point together. I brought Viggo Mortensen [to Lord of the
Rings]. That was a story in itself, since he was a replacement and because
he and Peter couldn't meet the first time. When Peter realized that he
needed to make a change, I pushed forward on Viggo, and his manager, who's
a very dear friend, helped maneuver it into position because of the time."

With a $270 million production already underway, Jackson had little time to
stall. He took a chance with Mortensen and soon knew "fate had dealt us a
very good card." Jackson has said, "He's an actor with huge integrity and
professional responsibility, and, once he's committed to a movie, he's
there for you morning, noon, and night. It doesn't matter what time of the
day it is. It doesn't matter how long you've been working."
Mortensen adds that the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings, of which
there were many, were by far the most demanding.

He colorfully explains, "Any battle scene involves being patient because it
takes longer than a dialogue, and you shoot in lots of pieces. It's just
time-consuming, and because my character was in so many battles, I
essentially had no days off to speak of. Neither did Legolas or Gimli, the
actors [Bloom and John Rhys-Davies, respectively] playing those parts. All
the actors and all the stunt people got hurt several times in one way or
another, luckily not too seriously for the most part-pulled muscles, broken
this and that, but nothing that put us completely out of commission. One
stunt man broke his leg really badly, but then being that the project
lasted so long, six months later he was back for more-lighting himself on
fire and skewering himself.

"One of the reasons that we did get injured was that we threw ourselves, in
the interest of telling the story as well as we could and keeping it
grounded in some kind of reality, into those scenes in the same way that we
threw ourselves into the more emotional, straight acting scenes. It was
just a part of what we were doing and once we got to those battle scenes,
we were already so involved that that there wasn't anything we hesitated to
do. There was virtually no distinction between stunt players and extras and
principal actors. We were all in that same soup, and we were all exhausted
and sick."

Open to Anything

There are many more stories of Mortensen's commitment to this project. The
film's costume designer, Ngila Dickson, has said that Mortensen lived in
his costume on and off the set, even mending it by himself as Aragorn would
have. Co-star Liv Tyler has said that he carried his sword with him
everywhere he went. Some people who worked on the production claim he lived
in the woods for part of the time during the making of the film. Ask
Mortensen about whether these stories are true, and he shrugs and explains
that he always tries to remain as open as possible during the portrayal of
any character.

He says, "I think acting, to quote a song by the band X, 'It's a game that
moves as you play.' You have to be flexible. It's not just that every story
is going to ask different things of you. The different performers that
you'll encounter, the different directors, the different writing ask you to
do or to try to accomplish different things. But even with the same
people--say with these people that I've been making The Lord of the Rings
with on and off for four years--from take to take things change. People's
level of energy changes, people's focus changes, people's interest in the
scene comes from a different place, and you have to be open to that. You
don't have to, but you have the choice to be open to it, and in little and
big ways how you approach any given moment can be quite different from take
to take, from moment to moment, from line to line."

His acting process was particularly beneficial to playing Aragorn.

"Aragorn is a character who speaks more between words or without words,"
says Mortensen, who found parallels between this character and those in
Nordic mythology, samurai stories, and old-fashioned Hollywood Westerns.
"So reacting and being open to what was going around me was essential to
getting across the internal journey that the character was on. And that
adage that if you are thinking something, if you are working in that way,
the audience will feel and see and know it--I think that's true. You just
have to have faith in doing things the right way. Some people don't trust
that and they overdo it, either physically or verbally. That is dangerous.
And sometimes people do it just to draw attention to themselves and away
from others.

He continues, "There are performers--and I run into them on almost every
movie--who deliberately sabotage the work of others. You can feel that they
are trying to diminish what you are doing or make you feel uncomfortable on
the set in sometimes very subtle ways, believing that the worse you look,
the better they'll look."

Fortunately, Mortensen encountered not a single scene-stealer on the set of
The Lord of the Rings. "It's reinforced my belief in the group ethic," he
says. "The greatest reward for me [on this film] was getting to know these
actors and going through this together--how we got through good times, and
especially bad times, together as a group. In that sense I think that Peter
cast the movie very well. He picked a group of people who worked well
together and didn't complain too much about the hardships, to the point
where the last six months was [a schedule of] six days a week, 16 hours a
day--just, 'Go, go, go,' no end in sight. And people really did pull
together and work as a group. It's the way that actors should always work,
whether it's in a play or in a movie, and I don't see that often. That
ideal was one that we adhered to. As a result of that effort, I have a
group of friends that I'm as close to as anyone I know and who will always
be my friends."

Indeed the morning we sat down for our interview, he apologized for being
so tired, saying he had stayed out too late the night before, "drinking
with the Hobbits," as he still affectionately refers to his co-stars Elijah
Wood, Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, and Billy Boyd.

Mortensen has also come to believe that he, along with his co-stars in The
Lord of the Rings, share much in common with their characters' journeys in
the story. "I think that our experiences as actors reflected what the
characters have gone through," he says. "And in many ways I realized no
matter how much I researched and drew from that, in the end my best
resource and closest thing to what we were going through as characters was
what we were going through as people."

There's a quote from one of The Lord of the Rings films that particularly
resonates with Mortensen: "Do well by your kinsmen and take little revenge
for their wrongdoings. Endure with patience and you will win long-lasting
praise," as actor Bernard Hill's character, King Theoden, says. "I think
that's kind of Aragorn's point of view," Mortensen says. These are also
words that sum up the actor's approach to his work and his rise to success.

Not About Winning

The commendable humility in Mortensen, reflected also in his portrayal of
Aragorn, stems from the idea that no man succeeds alone. For Mortensen the
glory of battle--or of acting--is not in winning but in how well you fought
beside your fellow man, or woman.

Says the actor, "Anytime you're thinking of results--how you want to come
off in a scene or accepting a role or playing a scene in a way that you can
steal focus--you're taking a shortcut, which necessarily implies jumping
over, skipping the reacting part. You're already thinking of where you want
to be and what you want to get done. You can't both be open to whatever
might happen--preparing well, yes, but then being open and therefore
reacting. You can't be thinking about winning a scene, and I've
unfortunately heard actors--a lot of young actors who are too dumb to
realize that saying that doesn't sound good, but also a lot of older actors
do it in very subtle ways where it sometimes take you a long time to
realize that's what they're doing, and you just have to find a way to deal
with it.

"I've also seen advertised, teachers saying, 'I'll show you how to not only
win in auditions, I'll show you how to win every scene.' You can't win
every scene. That's not even a goal. The goal isn't to win anything. The
goal is to be there. That's how you tell a story. And so when you're
thinking in terms of results, then you're skipping the reaction part, the
foundation of good acting." BSW

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