Viggo Mortensen Biography

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He was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on the 20th of October, 1958. His father, Viggo Sr, was Danish, while his mother was American. The couple had met in Norway and married in Holland, in a Lutheran ceremony. Though he came from farming stock in Denmark, Viggo Sr was set on becoming a businessman and, hoping to make his fortune, in 1960 moved his family (Viggo has two younger brothers) to South America. Here they would shift between Buenos Aires in Argentina and Venezuela, often spending holidays back in Denmark, on the Mortensen family farm.

Young Viggo was an artistic kid, always to be seen with a pencil and paper on hand. This would continue back in New York State when, his parents divorcing in 1969, he and his brothers would move with their mother from Argentina back to Watertown. It was a strange time, as if the whole world were changing, for they arrived back in America just after the first moon landing and just before the cultural phenomenon that was Woodstock (Viggo would, 30 years later, star in A Walk On The Moon, set at exactly this point, and very close to Watertown).

In 1972, Viggo would enrol at Watertown High School where, known as a friendly, kind and shy kid, he would feature on the tennis team while captaining the swimming team. He also had a further artistic interest. Now armed with a camera, he would prowl the streets, snapping any person or scene that caught his eye. It was a habit he’d never relinquish.

But he wasn’t simply a quiet, bookish kid – he certainly had his moments. At Halloween when he was 17, for instance, he got seriously drunk with his friends and wound up in a brawl, a combination of a fist and a barbed wire fence resulting in a severe cut above his upper lip. He was so out-of-it he didn’t need an anaesthetic during the stitching. He still carries the scar to this day.

Graduating from High School in 1976, he moved on to college at St Lawrence University in Canton, a short distance north-east of Watertown. He’d graduate from here in 1980, with a degree in Government and Language (the language being Spanish, making Viggo fluent in three tongues – English, Danish and Spanish. He’s also handy in French, Norwegian, Italian and Swedish). At this stage, he had no real clue as to which career he might follow, so he took off back to Denmark where, living with his cousins, he spent a couple of years variously employed as a waiter, a flower-seller and a forklift driver.

Come 1982, he followed a girlfriend back to New York and it was here that he decided to become an actor. And, being Viggo, he threw himself into the task with maximum intensity. Enrolling at Warren Robertson’s prestigious Acting Workshop, he spent two years at the craft, at the same time gaining practical experience by appearing in the likes of Romeo And Juliet, Kevin O’ Cypher, Two By Two and The Rapido with various New York repertory theatre companies, including the Ryan, the Indiana, the American, and the New York Ensemble.

Once out of college, work came immediately – excellent work. First was Jonathan Demme’s Swing Shift, a WW2 piece that saw Viggo alongside such luminaries as Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Ed Harris and Holly Hunter. Then there was Woody Allen’s masterpiece The Purple Rose Of Cairo, with Mia Farrow and Jeff Daniels. What a start. At least it would have been if Viggo’s work had not hit the cutting-room floor and stayed there. He was, of course, hugely disappointed. Not just at the missed opportunity but, more importantly for a creative workaholic, at the wasted time.

But it wasn’t all disastrous. There was a brief appearance in the lengthy historical miniseries, George Washington where, incredibly, Washington was played by Barry Bostwick of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and, latterly, Spin City. Better still, there was Peter Weir’s Witness. Here tough city cop Harrison Ford must hole out in a remote Amish community in order to protect a young witness to a Mob killing. 

While there, he falls for the boy’s mother, Kelly McGillis, a rival Amish suitor being played by Alexander Godunov. Viggo won the part of Godunov’s younger brother, to begin with a walk-on role but, so impressed was Weir by Mortensen’s charisma, the part was extended, with Viggo at his screen brother’s side almost every time he appears.

Feeling that his best chance lay in Los Angeles, Viggo now took off for California. Working as a truck driver, waiter and bartender to keep himself going, slowly things began to happen. His first real recognition came when he won a Dramalogue Critics Award for his performances as a sadistic Nazi in Bent at the Coast Playhouse. This involved questions of love and betrayal amongst homosexuals in Dachau and, coincidentally, the lead role of Max had been originated by Ian McKellen, later to join Viggo in The Lord Of The Rings.

Now at least his personal life began to come together. In Salvation!, he played a seedy sort whose wife becomes obsessed with TV evangelist Stephen McHattie. Her slutty sister tries to seduce the “priest”, Viggo tries to blackmail him and, bizarrely, the wife tries to boost his operation by becoming a Christian heavy metal singer. Directly following the real-life Bakker scandal, it was wildly satirical stuff, and very entertaining. 

More importantly, though, it introduced Viggo to Exene Cervenka, who played his screen wife. Exene was the singer in X, the very best of the early Eighties US punk bands and the only one to go on to major success. As a maker and patron of underground art, she was a perfect match for the restlessly creative Mortensen, and the pair would marry in 1987, Exene bearing a son, Henry Blake, the next year.

Two more parts quickly came Viggo’s way. First was Fresh Horses, where college student Andrew McCarthy falls for backwoods girl Molly Ringwald, only to discover that she’s only 16 AND she’s already married to abusive Viggo. Then there was Prison, directed by Renny Harlin (later to make Die Hard 2 and Deep Blue Sea, and marry Geena Davis). This was a superior horror flick which began with a 1956 execution in the Big House. 

Thirty years later, the prison has been re-opened, the vile guard who oversaw the electrocution is now the vicious warden, and people start to die in impressively violent circumstances. Is the place haunted by the vengeful spirit of the executed inmate, and what’s the connection with new con Viggo, who looks exactly like him?

But it wasn’t all disastrous. There was a brief appearance in the lengthy historical miniseries, George Washington where, incredibly, Washington was played by Barry Bostwick of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and, latterly, Spin City. Better still, there was Peter Weir’s Witness. Here tough city cop Harrison Ford must hole out in a remote Amish community in order to protect a young witness to a Mob killing. While there, he falls for the boy’s mother, Kelly McGillis, a rival Amish suitor being played by Alexander Godunov. Viggo won the part of Godunov’s younger brother, to begin with a walk-on role but, so impressed was Weir by Mortensen’s charisma, the part was extended, with Viggo at his screen brother’s side almost every time he appears.

Feeling that his best chance lay in Los Angeles, Viggo now took off for California. Working as a truck driver, waiter and bartender to keep himself going, slowly things began to happen. His first real recognition came when he won a Dramalogue Critics Award for his performances as a sadistic Nazi in Bent at the Coast Playhouse. This involved questions of love and betrayal amongst homosexuals in Dachau and, coincidentally, the lead role of Max had been originated by Ian McKellen, later to join Viggo in The Lord Of The Rings.

Now at least his personal life began to come together. In Salvation!, he played a seedy sort whose wife becomes obsessed with TV evangelist Stephen McHattie. Her slutty sister tries to seduce the “priest”, Viggo tries to blackmail him and, bizarrely, the wife tries to boost his operation by becoming a Christian heavy metal singer. Directly following the real-life Bakker scandal, it was wildly satirical stuff, and very entertaining. 

More importantly, though, it introduced Viggo to Exene Cervenka, who played his screen wife. Exene was the singer in X, the very best of the early Eighties US punk bands and the only one to go on to major success. As a maker and patron of underground art, she was a perfect match for the restlessly creative Mortensen, and the pair would marry in 1987, Exene bearing a son, Henry Blake, the next year.

Two more parts quickly came Viggo’s way. First was Fresh Horses, where college student Andrew McCarthy falls for backwoods girl Molly Ringwald, only to discover that she’s only 16 AND she’s already married to abusive Viggo. Then there was Prison, directed by Renny Harlin (later to make Die Hard 2 and Deep Blue Sea, and marry Geena Davis). This was a superior horror flick which began with a 1956 execution in the Big House. 

Thirty years later, the prison has been re-opened, the vile guard who oversaw the electrocution is now the vicious warden, and people start to die in impressively violent circumstances. Is the place haunted by the vengeful spirit of the executed inmate, and what’s the connection with new con Viggo, who looks exactly like him?

Having thus far concentrated on artistic, and consequently independent endeavours, now Viggo accepted that he needed to involve himself in more commercial works in order to maintain his family. He tried out for lead roles, but despite his evident good looks and charisma, his intensity and sallow Nordic features saw him cast as low-lifes and villains again and again. In Boiling Point he played the murderous attack dog partner of con man Dennis Hopper as they battled against secret service agent Wesley Snipes (Hopper, also his co-star in The Indian Runner, would become a close friend). Then, in Ruby Cairo, he embezzled a fortune from his business and faked his own death, leaving wife Andie MacDowell to pick up the pieces.

Next came a short but impressive role in Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way, where Al Pacino played an ex-con desperately trying to go straight, despite the lunatic efforts of his shady lawyer (Sean Penn) and Viggo’s wired-up paraplegic grass, Lalin. After this, Viggo was off to England to film The Young Americans, in which he played Carl Frazer, a mysterious gang leader who recruits English teenagers to carry out his drug deals and acts of thuggery, all the while pursued by US copper Harvey Keitel.

Yet there was still room for more independent projects. 1994 saw him in the strange, desert-set soap opera The Gospel According To Harry, directed by Lech Majewski (later to write the art-hit Basquiat). There was an appearance as a Homeless Man in the social satire Floundering, featuring John Cusack, Steve Buscemi, Billy Bob Thornton and Exene (as a Homeless Woman). Then there was The Crew, where he was a smug and vicious rich guy who invites his sister and a few other folks onto his yacht for the weekend, only for the holiday to descend into arguments, bickering and, when another couple are rescued from a burning boat, an all-out battle for control.

1994 ended with another starring role, in American Yakuza. Here he played an FBI agent who’s ordered to LA to infiltrate a burgeoning Japanese gang. Rising quickly through the ranks, he finds himself caught between the FBI, the yakuza and an enraged US mafia. This led to another major production, Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide. Here there’s a nuclear stand-off between Russia and America and orders are sent through to a US submarine to commence firing. Trouble is, the orders are incomplete, leading to a struggle between gung-ho captain Gene Hackman and his more cautious mate Denzel Washington, Viggo playing the crucial role of the lieutenant who controls the missile code.

Now Viggo was on a roll. Next came The Prophecy, where Christopher Walken played an archangel at war with God and on Earth to find a 100% wicked soul to help him in his struggle. Viggo made a very impressive Lucifer who, rather than helping Walken in his sinfulness, as you’d expect, decides he could do without a rival in beastliness and so rips out Walken’s heart and eats it. 

There would be more dark goings-on when he reunited with Reflecting Skin director Philip Ridley for The Passion Of Darkly Noon. This would see Brendan Fraser as a young man horribly confused by an ultra-strict religious upbringing and driven to madness by the sound of Viggo making love to his heart’s desire, Ashley Judd.

Next, Gimlet would take Mortensen off to Spain to play a freaky voyeur fixating on the owner of a hip Barcelona bar. When her boyfriend is horribly murdered and she starts getting messages of obsessive love, you have to think the Vig-man’s involved. And the indie-ness would continue with Albino Alligator, Kevin Spacey’s directorial debut, where Viggo played a New Orleans suit, caught up in a hostage situation when bungling thieves Matt Dillon, Gary Sinise and William Fichtner foolishly take control of a late-night drinking den.

Now, after a good decade of work, Mortensen had finally come to prominence (sadly, at the same time he was splitting from Exene, though their divorce would be entirely amicable). Viggo now entered a run of big pictures, beginning with Jane Campion’s The Portrait Of A Lady. Here Nicole Kidman played a free-spirited US heiress who, turning down genteel suitor Viggo, gets caught up with malevolent plotters Barbara Hershey and John Malkovich. Then, just by way of a change, there was Daylight, a disaster flick where people get trapped in a New York tunnel and Sylvester Stallone, as a disgraced rescue serviceman tries heroically to free them. Before he can, though, Viggo, as a sportswear magnate and part-time mountaineer who luckily always travels with his equipment, has a go himself. A disastrous go, as it happens.

1997 brought two more stand-out parts. First he took the Barry Newman role of Kowalski in an update of 1971′s surreal thriller Vanishing Point, trying to avoid the law as he raced 1200 miles home to the side of his wife as she goes into a difficult labour. Then came GI Jane, directed by Ridley Scott, brother of Crimson Tide’s Tony (indeed, GI Jane’s submarine shots were actually off-cuts from the earlier film). Here senator Anne Bancroft, a freedom fighter in the area of sexual politics, sets Demi Moore up to go through Navy SEALS training, with Viggo doing a Louis Gossett Jr as her harsh taskmaster. 

But, being Viggo, he couldn’t just deal in goading and insults – though he does deliver a particularly fine “I always look for one quitter on the first day, and that day doesn’t stop until I get it”. By having his character read JM Coetzee and quote DH Lawrence, he lent depth to Master Chief Urgayle that elevated him above the purely sadistic. Furthermore, as an actor who goes to extreme lengths in his research, Viggo spent many months in physical training, beginning way before the rest of the cast and always working on his own, just so he could display the requisite superiority and consequent distance.

The next year saw another pair of major releases. In A Perfect Murder, Michael Douglas played a high-flying industrialist who manages to alienate his young wife Gwyneth Paltrow so badly she engages in an affair with boho artist Viggo. But Viggo’s not the arch-romantic he appears, and when an embittered Douglas tries to hire him to off Paltrow he agrees. 

Naturally, it all goes hideously wrong, as it did in Viggo’s next picture, Gus Van Sant’s faithful reproduction of Psycho, where Viggo played Sam Loomis, the dopey boyfriend of Anne Heche’s Marion Crane, a girl doomed to a watery death.

Now Mortensen’s releases dropped to one a year. 1999 brought A Walk On The Moon, a sweet picture which took him back to his own re-arrival in America. Set in 1969, it saw him as a blouse-salesman who engages in an affair with bored housewife Diane Lane and takes her off to Woodstock. Then came 28 Days, where he played a top baseball pitcher who enters rehab to break his substance addiction and quietly courts Sandra Bullock, a good-time girl who cannot accept she has a problem.

The reasons for this drop in work-rate (and Viggo is a worker by nature) were two-fold. Firstly, having viewed several of his paintings, the set designers of A Perfect Murder had decided to use Viggo’s own work in the movie, demanding that he rapidly turn out a series of larger pieces. 

This inspired him to such a degree that he spent more and more time in isolation, dedicated to his art-work. Through the influence of Dennis Hopper, he would exhibit at the Robert Mann Gallery in New York, and then at Track 16 in Santa Monica, many of the exhibits being photos he’d taken on the sets of his various movies.

Then there was the poetry and the music. As said, his divorce from Exene Cervenka was entirely amicable. He’d look after Henry when she was on tour, and she’d take over while he was on-set. The family would even holiday together. On top of this, she’d usually be involved (along with former X bassist DJ Bonebrake) when Viggo put together CDs of poetry readings, jazzy music and “organised chaos”. These would include 1997′s One Less Thing, ’98′s One Man’s Meat (featuring both Viggo’s brother Hank, and Donita Sparks, vocalist with L7) and The Other Parade. 

Mortensen would also appear, with the Duke McVinnie Band, on Don’t Tell Me What To Do, recorded live on KCRW, and on Live At Beyond Baroque, another live show featuring Exene and controversial performance artist Karen Finley. He’d already, before finding fame, released a book of poetry, entitled Ten Last Night, and two other volumes of artwork would now follow – Errant Vine and Recent Forgeries.

The other reason for the fall in movie output was that Viggo had embarked upon the biggest project of his career – arguably the biggest project in ANYONE’s career. After just a few days of shooting, Stuart Townsend was fired from the set of Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, being shot over an 18 month period in New Zealand. 

Someone was thus needed to step into the shoes of Aragorn, long lost heir to the throne of Gondor, unrequited lover of elf princess Arwen and a prime mover in the rebellion against the dark lord Sauron. Viggo was called and given an afternoon to decide. He asked Henry if he could deal with such a break from his father and, being told that he HAD to take the role, he agreed to play Aragorn, otherwise known as Strider (oddly, Viggo’s character in A Walk On The Moon had been called Walker).

Having never read Tolkien’s novel, Mortensen, always a vigorous researcher of his roles, felt thoroughly unprepared and nervous. Reading the book on the plane to New Zealand, though, he discovered that, fortunately, these were just the feelings he needed to play Aragorn, a man who, as even his greatest ancestor has succumbed to the power of the ring, believes himself to be too weak for the task ahead. Beyond this, Viggo found a connection through Nordic mythology, legends Tolkien had used heavily in the writing and which Viggo had heard many times from his Danish family.

And so, as ever, he threw himself into the part, doing all his own stunts, demanding script revisions so he could speak more lines in Elvish, and always using a real steel sword, rather than the lightweight aluminium and rubber versions that had been specially made. At one point, having lost a tooth in one particularly rough fight sequence, he called for superglue so he could stick it back in and keep filming, becoming thoroughly irate when Jackson sent him to the dentist. Naturally, he was back before the cameras that same afternoon. His efforts were said to be a mighty inspiration to the rest of the cast who, for the last 6 months of shooting, were working 16 hours a day, 6 days a week.

Mortensen’s work certainly paid off, with The Fellowship Of The Ring and its follow-ups The Two Towers and The Return Of The King becoming some of the most popular movies ever made. At last his striking looks and fierce intensity had found a home – Aragorn was no pretty boy, after all, rather a flawed, dangerous but honourable warrior. Viggo would move on to star in Hidalgo, the true story of Frank T. Hopkins, a courier rider for the Pony Express who, in 1890, travelled with his titular horse to Saudi to compete in a dangerous marathon race with a huge prize at stake. 

Naturally, he would not over-burden himself with film work. He also concentrated on a new album, with guest appearances from his Lord Of The Rings co-stars Elijah Wood, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan. And there’d be another book of photos, called Miyelo and loosely based on the massacre of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek, wherein his colourful abstract shots would be accompanied by pertinent quotes from the likes of TS Eliot and Khalil Gibran.

Now one of the most recognisable stars in the world, he can pick and choose his parts. And there will be many as Mortensen, who believes absolutely in the necessity of creativity, feels that he should always “do” – that is spend every waking moment making things happen. There will also, of course, be more poetry, more paintings, more photos, more music, more exhibitions. The man is, after all, an artistic powerhouse.~ Dominic Wills