Our celebration of Actors this month continues with Lynn Lee on Viggo
Is Viggo Mortensen the most interesting man in the world? Based on his peripatetic history and eclectic interests, he’s certainly a contender. In addition to acting, he’s a prolific painter, photographer, composer, and poet who founded his own publishing house. A dual American and Danish citizen who spent his early childhood in South America and Denmark before returning to his native New York, he speaks multiple languages, with greatest fluency in English, Spanish, and Danish. Oh, and his ex-wife is punk singer Exene Cervenko, with whom he has a son.
As my husband put it, “Viggo Mortensen is who James Franco wishes he was.”
I can’t speak to the artistic merits of Viggo’s off-screen pursuits, but I do see him as a kind of anti-Franco in keeping them largely off the public radar. And while he’s clearly driven by a need to express himself via many outlets, he still exudes a sense of some private, fundamentally unknowable core self. It permeates his screen presence, too, and is part of what makes him so intriguing as an actor. (Well, that plus the rugged Scandinavian good looks and dimpled chin don't hurt, either.) More...
That suggestion of hidden depths may have helped him land the role that vaulted him from the ranks of rising actor to movie star—namely, Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings series. Even as he cut a convincing (and swoonworthy) swashbuckling hero, he also revealed a more introspective, ambivalent, self-doubting side to Aragorn that wasn’t present in the novel. It might not be canon, but it was effective and memorable.
In other ways, though, it was an atypical performance for the actor. Perhaps because Aragorn is unequivocally good, he lacked the hint of menace that always seemed to be lurking behind Viggo’s stoic demeanor in his other memorable roles, from the troubled bad-seed brother in Sean Penn’s The Indian Runner to Demi Moore’s enigmatic CO in G.I. Jane. Even as a sex god in A Walk on the Moon (no, really, that’s what he is, opposite an equally sexy Diane Lane), he brought a frisson of danger that somehow enhanced rather than undercut his tenderness as a lover.
He’d later hone that duality to perfection in his collaborations with director David Cronenberg—in particular, the bracing one-two punch of A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, the latter earning him the Oscar nomination he really should have gotten for the former. (Not to knock his work in Eastern Promises, which probably deserved an award for that bathhouse fight scene alone.) As two sides of the same coin – the criminal posing as an honest man in HoV, the cop posing as a criminal in EP – he brings to mind a coiled spring: even before it’s sprung, the viewer can sense that behind those calm blue eyes and quiet affect lies a capacity for terrifying violence that can crack through at any moment, even right after a gesture of utmost gentleness. You see a version of that dynamic again in Hossein Amini's The Two Faces of January, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel, in which Viggo’s outwardly suave, inwardly desperate grifter faces off against a younger, wilier, but less seasoned version of himself (played by Oscar Isaac).
Apart from his work with Cronenberg (which also included a smartly understated turn as Sigmund Freud, possibly the only thing everyone could agree on about the polarizing A Dangerous Method), Viggo’s post-LOTR filmography has been a bit spotty and definitely idiosyncratic; a fair number of his films have barely registered in the U.S. film market. But many of them have felt like deeply personal, sometimes oddball ventures, consistent with his general MO in life. One gets the sense that starring in one of the most high-profile, instantly iconic movie franchises of our time changed him not a whit except insofar as it’s given him greater means to pursue whatever project pleases his fancy, no matter how obscure. Who else would have produced, starred in, and composed the score for a film (Jauja) entirely in Danish, Spanish, and French, about a 19th century Danish captain searching for a runaway daughter in Patagonia?
For my part, I applaud him for marching to his own drumbeat but admit I’d like to see him in a film that gets a bit more mainstream recognition. Will he have a winner in the upcoming Captain Fantastic, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year and is screening at Cannes next month? While early reviews have been mixed, his performance has been well received, though it remains to be seen if the film gets any awards traction. Still, it’s comforting to think that Viggo himself almost certainly isn’t wasting any time wondering if it will or not. I imagine he’s got plenty of other thoughts and plans to occupy himself.
Previously on Actor's Month: 80s Action Hero, Current Stars Who Need an Oscar Nom, Olympian Actors, Antonio Banderas in Law of Desire, Sterling K Brown in The People vs OJ Simpson, Chris Cooper, Harrison Ford in Witness, Andrew Garfield, Brendan Gleeson, Tom Hiddleston, Jason Scott Lee, Joe Manganiello in Pee Wee's Big Holiday, Jack Nicholson, Ryan O'Neal, A Conversation With Gregory Peck, Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Shannon, Aaron Tveit,