‘You play the cards you’re dealt’: is Viggo Mortensen Hollywood’s most versatile star?
Viggo Mortensen is a busy man. He is not only an actor, but also a poet, a musician, a photographer and the hands-on owner of a small arthouse press on the website of which he publishes regular updates on pressing issues of the day gleaned from media outlets around the world. He punctuates the newsroll with aphorisms from thinkers he admires. “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?” reads a recent one, from Henry David Thoreau, that accompanies an article on groundwater loss.
It is a question Mortensen clearly asks regularly of himself. Shortly before accepting the breakthrough role of Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, he turned down X-Men because he didn’t want to be trapped into endlessly repeating himself. A three-time Oscar nominee, he is a veteran of 58 films who has made an indelible impression as characters ranging from Tom Stall, a diner owner with a secret in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, to the hellscape survivalist Man in the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the bouncer turned chauffeur Tony “Lip” Vallelonga in Green Book.
He is busy in part because he has turned to directing, too, and is on promotion duty for his second film, a western called The Dead Don’t Hurt. Given that he is its writer and composer as well as its director and star, it is a big undertaking. But he is determined to do right by Eureka, a little film by the Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso, for which he also has top billing, even though he makes only a fleeting appearance in the first few minutes, as a gun-slinging loner who busts into a lawless frontier town in a monochrome film-within-a-film.
It takes days to pin him down to an early morning phone interview from Madrid, where he lives for part of the year with his partner, the actor Ariadna Gil. But when he finally calls, he is generous with his time and thoughtful with his answers.
To understand his involvement in Eureka, it helps to have watched Jauja, his 2014 collaboration with Alonso. In the earlier film – Alonso’s first involving professional actors – Mortensen starred as Gunnar Dinesen, a Danish engineer in late 19th-century Argentina under contract to help the army in the brutal settlement of Patagonia. Like Mortensen’s character in Eureka, Dinesen is in search of a daughter who doesn’t want to be found. In both films, the daughter is played by Viilbjørk Malling Agger, leaving aficionados of Alonso’s elusive work to figure out what, if anything, this means.
Mortensen and Alonso bonded after a chance meeting at the Toronto film festival in 2006. “We got along well, since I was raised in Argentina until I was 11,” says the actor, whose Danish father and American mother moved there when he was small to manage a poultry farm. “We had things and also friends in common, as it turned out.”
One of them was the poet Fabián Casas, who later wrote the screenplay for Jauja (and shares the writing credits for Eureka with Alonso and Martín Caamaño). “I read it and thought it was interesting, so we collaborated to make this strange hybrid movie that is both Danish and Argentine,” says Mortensen. When Alonso mentioned that he wanted to add some music, but had run out of money, Mortensen offered to provide that as well, cannibalising a couple of albums he had made with the former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Buckethead.
It turns out that Mortensen’s involvement in Eureka, which is substantively set on a Native American
reservation in modern-day South Dakota, isn’t as minimal as it first seems. It was he who introduced Alonso to the people living on the reservation, several of whom would go on to make their screen debuts in the film. He is particularly proud of Alaina Clifford, a police officer by trade and in the movie, who gives a stunning account of life patrolling dead-end streets.
Mortensen’s relationship with the Lakota people goes back decades. He has always been interested in early American history, he says, but had a chance to take it further while making the 2004 western biopic Hidalgo. “I wanted to understand the people, so I rode horses with them and eventually I was basically adopted by one family and given a name in their language. “I was fortunate to get to know them,” he says. “For good reasons, they are very wary of letting people into their lives.” The name he was given is Petayuhamani – “the one who carries the fire”.
Hidalgo recalls the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, when nearly 300 Lakota people were shot by the US army after a botched attempt to evict them from a camp. The event is commemorated in a ceremonial ghost dance, which was recreated in the film. It so captivated Mortensen that he asked for permission to photograph it. He collected the resulting pictures into a book that is available from his publisher, Perceval Press, in a threevolume package, including a 63-page poem written during the pandemic.
Mortensen set up Perceval in 2002 with the money he made from The
Lord of the Rings. Specialising in art, critical writing and poetry, it also sells his albums, although its website carries a stern warning that personal fanmail will neither be read nor returned. Its main office is in California, where his son, Henry, holds the fort between acting jobs, but its books are printed in Spain. “I not only edit each book, but I go to the printer and look at every single page as they come out,” he says.
Self-sufficiency is a recurrent theme of his career. He only drafted himself in to star in The Dead Don’t Hurt when his lead actor dropped out at the 11th hour. “We scrambled to recast the part so we wouldn’t lose the financing,” he says. “I went to two or three people who really liked the script, the character and the idea of working with [its star] Vicky Krieps, but pre-production was about to start in Mexico and it was too late.”
Stepping in meant serious rewrites, as Mortensen, who is in his mid-60s, was considerably older than his character was intended to be. Directing himself is more tiring, he says, but he has always been a team player. “And if you’re in the scenes, you’re a team player in a different way than just the director trying to help them get the performance. So even though it’s tiring, it’s physically stimulating and, in any case, those are the cards you’re dealt. You try to make it work as best you can. And I think we did.”
The combination of his unpredictable choices and his outspoken political views has won him a devoted following. In a 2016 interview with this paper, he was a fearless critic of Donald Trump – and Hillary Clinton. How does he feel now that Trump may be heading for a second term? “Look, I am American, and I spend a lot of time there, and I’m with my son a lot,” he replies. “I don’t have anything against the people, the animals, the landscapes of the US. I have a problem, as many people do, with the government and politics. But you would feel that way legitimately, I think, about any empire that has ever existed, whether it’s American or British or Spanish. I can understand it when people say: ‘If Trump gets elected again, I’m moving to Canada or giving up my passport.’ But I don’t feel that way.”
In its dreamy refusal to confine itself to a traditional narrative, and its suggestion of a wiser way of seeing the world that, in the words of one elder, is about space, not time, Eureka offers a structural and temperamental riposte to the conventions of western storytelling that chimes with Mortensen’s left-field interests. That said, as directors, he and Alonso are very different. “I like to have some kind of logic in terms of details, but his is a more visual sensibility; it’s about light and framing. I think we complement each other.”
He is aware that Alonso’s films are not to everyone’s taste. “Some say they don’t understand what’s going on, or why it has to be so slow. But I like the way Lisandro deals with people. And the way he visually translates story ideas to the screen is very brave. There are other people who try to do what he does, but it seems forced or pretentious. With him, the kind of stories he wants to tell and the way he wants to tell them feel organic. There is no other director quite like him.” With that, Mortensen is off to carry the fire to one of his other projects.
• Eureka is released in the UK on 16 February
I don’t have anything against the people, the animals, the landscapes of the US. I have a problem with the politics