Viggo Mortensen: Lay off the pope

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Viggo Mortensen says he doesn’t have a plan. It’s a funny thing to say midway through a conversation about a movie called “Everybody Has a Plan,” a low-budget Argentine thriller that Mortensen produced and in which he plays two roles, as a pair of twin brothers. (Yes, it’s in Spanish, but this isn’t some postmodern-flavored stunt, à la Will Ferrell's “Casa de Mi Padre.” Mortensen spent much of his childhood in Buenos Aires and speaks fluent Spanish, along with English and Danish, and can get by in several other languages. Are you surprised?)

Mortensen’s non-plan looks a lot like a plan to me, although maybe not an entirely conscious one. He has used the worldwide fame he earned for playing Aragorn (son of Arathorn) in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to declare his independence from the celebrity economy and follow his own idiosyncratic career path, which has included painting, poetry, music and three films with David Cronenberg, including an Oscar-nominated turn as a brutal Ukrainian mobster in “Eastern Promises.”

Are Hobbits’ feet hot?

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 23:00:00 +0000

If there’s anything that can shut down a healthy libido — anything that might be reasonably considered the opposite of “hot” — it’s tragic nobility. And if anyone's bearing such an affliction in literature, it's J.R.R. Tolkien's heroes — to the nth degree.

Tolkien drew inspiration for his invented world from the ballads and sagas of the Anglo-Saxons, who ruled England intermittently (there were a few awkward Danish occupations) for a handful of centuries preceding the Norman Conquest. After the Conquest, Anglo-Saxons remained the predominant demographic in the country, but the Normans completely took over as the ruling class, establishing one of history’s first examples of the 1 percent versus the 99 percent, which lent the Anglo-Saxons a kind of tragic nobility in the imaginations of succeeding centuries.

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Viggo Mortensen: Lay off the pope

Are Hobbits’ feet hot?