Lord of the Rings star Viggo Mortensen wrote, directed, starred in and scored his new film. Adam Bloodworth meets a rare talent As Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, Viggo Mortensen helped the trilogy battle its way to 2.9 billion dollars for the international box office, a record-breaking sum that earmarked a new era of fantasy.
But for the actor from New York, Middle Earth was a relative flash-in-the-pan moment. The 65-year-old has spent the last two decades (the final Rings film came out in 2003) working as a polymath, writing, directing, acting, and publishing poetry and visual art. His Lord of the Rings alum Elijah Wood recently called Mortensen “a true, true artist.
” (Emphasis on the double “true.”) In his latest film, The Dead Don’t Hurt , in cinemas now, Mortensen has one-upped himself, for the first time scoring the music for his own movie as well as acting, writing and directing. He says the musical storytelling is designed to occasionally take precedence over the acting, and that sound and images are not always designed to work together; sometimes in contrast to one another.
Stubbing out a cigarette on the bottom of his boot on the balcony of a London hotel room, Viggo Mortensen takes a seat on the sofa opposite me as I recite to him what his former Lord of the Rings co-star said. How do complements like that feel? “Very flattering,” says Morgensen, using just the one “very.” “Especially from someone like him, you know.
He’s got a lot of things tha.