Smash hit

And this urge compulsively to create, how does that relate, exactly, to who you are? He sighs, sits back and, as if beginning anew the fairytale story of Viggo Mortensen, announces softly: “For as long as I can remember, even as a little boy, I used to think it was unfair that someday I was going to die.”

The story of Mortensen begins in New York, where he was born, but quickly moves to South America, where he was raised, the eldest of three boys, by his Danish father, also called Viggo, and American mother, Grace. The family remained in Argentina, where Viggo Sr managed a chicken farm, until 1969, when the parents divorced and Viggo Jr moved with his mother and brothers to New York State.

It was around this time that Mortensen began questioning the nature of mortality. “Whose idea was it?” he would ask. “I didn’t decide to come to this Earth and I certainly don’t want to leave it now that I’m here.”

He would eventually conclude “that life was short, and that I was interested in participating”. An artist was born.

Henceforth, Mortensen ping-ponged across the Atlantic, between New York and Denmark, working after finishing college as a trucker in Denmark and, later, as a waiter in New York. Which was where, on a whim, he took an acting class at Warren Robertson’s Theatre Workshop. There he found his calling, but struggled to find work. “I’d try out for everything and it would always come down to me and some other guy,” he says. Crucially, he lost the lead role in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan to Christopher Lambert. “Although if I’d gotten Greystoke I probably would’ve been frustrated,” he adds, tacitly acknowledging that it’s a bit of a stinker.

Mortensen nonetheless built a solid career as a character actor and a Method hard man. He stayed in character, for instance, as a mute, refusing to speak for the entire four-week shoot of the thriller The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995). Some of these early roles, he explains, “were just me, learning in the trenches, making mistakes on film. I did many movies before anyone asked me to do an interview.”

Along the way he married Exene Cervenka, once the singer with the early punk band X and a co-star in his religion-themed comedy Salvation. They had Henry and moved to Los Angeles, but would divorce in 1998. Today, though officially single, Mortensen says that the prospect of getting married again is “not impossible”.

The Lord of the Rings movies brought him superstardom. They brought him credibility and commercial clout too, and he quickly landed headlining roles in the adventure romp Hidalgo, the western Appaloosa and the Russian mobster drama Eastern Promises. The latter’s thrilling nude bathhouse punch-up epitomises the modern Mortensen — the fearlessness of a character actor combined with a leading man’s physique. Other Hollywood actors, he claims, would have flinched from doing that scene, “unless they were presented in, how can I say, a more ‘flattering’ fashion”.

He is referring, it seems, to the undignified depiction of his genitalia therein, seen flipping and flapping through the air (not exactly the sword of Aragorn), as he is thrown from pillar to post. “It was cold, uncomfortable and violent,” he says. “This was not about vanity.”

The Mortensen movie star story ends, it seems, here in this room, although there is still one movie left to release, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic novel The Road, which was shot before his self-imposed exile. He says that, of course, life goes on, and that he’s a busy man. As well as a new collection of published poems, called Songs of Winter, there is also a Spanish language production of Ariel Dorfman’s play Purgatorio that he plans to perform in Madrid this winter. “I haven’t done theatre in 20 years,” he says. “And that terrifies me more than death.”

Ah yes, death. We finish on death and melancholia once more. “I don’t like the idea of dying. I’m not terrified of it, but I can see how one can become obsessed by it,” he says.

I ask him, half-jokingly, why he hasn’t made any comedies. “I don’t get offered many,” he says. “Because it’s something I haven’t showed that I can do yet.”

Yet? What does ‘yet’ mean for his retirement plans? He answers enigmatically, says that life is a game that keeps moving and that the rules change even as you’re playing it. And then he gives a content little smile that seems to say: Viggo Mortensen, multi-hyphenate movie star, may be abandoning the business, but not for long.

Good is released on April 17

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