Viggo Mortensen

Biography

Before his acting career, Mortensen drove a truck in Esbjerg, Denmark, and sold flowers in Copenhagen. By then he had a bachelor’s degree in Spanish studies and government, and in Europe he had lived in Spain, England and Denmark.

In 1982 he returned to the United States, determined to become an actor.

Viggo Peter Mortensen Jr. was born on 20 October 1958 in New York City, to an American mother and a Danish father. His childhood was spent on the move: briefly Venezuela, then Denmark, and finally Argentina, where his father ran poultry farms and ranches and the family lived in the provinces of Córdoba, Chaco and Buenos Aires. There he attended primary school and learned Spanish so well that he speaks it as fluently as English. In 1969 he returned to the United States and grew up in upstate New York, in Watertown. At school he played on the tennis team and captained the swimming team, and he took up photography. He graduated in 1976, then studied at Saint Lawrence University in Canton, New York, and took his degree in 1980. Besides English and Spanish he speaks Danish fluently; French too, while his Norwegian, Swedish and Italian are of varying degree.

He made his film debut in 1985 in Peter Weir’s thriller “Witness”, playing an Amish farmer. The director, by his own account, thought Mortensen had the right face. The next decade went to supporting parts, often villains: “The Indian Runner” (1991), Sean Penn’s first film as director, “Carlito’s Way” (1993), “Crimson Tide” (1995), and “The Prophecy” (1995), in which he played Lucifer himself. From the mid-1990s he was also given romantic leads: Caspar Goodwood in Jane Campion’s “The Portrait of a Lady” (1996), and a senior naval instructor in “GI Jane” (1997). In 1998 he appeared in two Hitchcock remakes, “Psycho” and “A Perfect Murder”. He played the painter in “A Perfect Murder” with his own paintings: the works on screen are his.

He got Aragorn almost by chance. Peter Jackson dropped Stuart Townsend, the first choice, as too young, and Mortensen replaced him during preparations; filming took place in 1999, when he was forty. By the accounts we have, his son, a Tolkien fan, persuaded him to accept, though that is hard to check. He did many of his own stunts and was hurt on set: he broke toes and lost a piece of a tooth. For the third film he wrote and performed the song “Aragorn’s Coronation”, to words by Tolkien, and in the extended edition of the first film he sings “The Lay of Beren and Lúthien”. For the whole trilogy, with “The Return of the King”, the cast won the Screen Actors Guild Award for 2003.

From 2005 Mortensen worked regularly with David Cronenberg: “A History of Violence” (2005), “Eastern Promises” (2007), “A Dangerous Method” (2011), in which he played Sigmund Freud, and “Crimes of the Future” (2022). For the role of a Russian gangster in London in “Eastern Promises” he reportedly spent about two months in Russia studying the language; the role brought his first Oscar nomination and a British Independent Film Award. For Freud he was nominated for a Golden Globe as best supporting actor. In 2006 he played Captain Alatriste in a Spanish-language film based on the novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte. His second and third Oscar nominations came with “Captain Fantastic” (2016), in which he played a father raising his children in the forest, and “Green Book” (2018), where he played Tony Lip, driver and bodyguard to the pianist Don Shirley. Later he appeared in Ron Howard’s “Thirteen Lives” (2022) as the British cave diver Rick Stanton; Stanton himself taught him to dive.

In 2020 “Falling”, his directorial debut, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival: he wrote the script, composed the music, produced and played the lead opposite Lance Henriksen. His second film as director, the Western “The Dead Don’t Hurt”, with Vicky Krieps, was shot in Mexico; in 2024 he showed it in Chernivtsi at the Mykolaichuk Open festival and opened the screening with a speech in Ukrainian.

Outside film he paints, photographs, writes poetry and records music. His painting is often abstract, with lines of his poetry written into it, and his work has been shown in galleries in several countries. With the guitarist Buckethead he recorded several albums, some released on his own label. He has also put out three discs of jazz. In 2002, with part of his earnings from “The Lord of the Rings”, he founded the publishing house Perceval Press, named after the knight of the Arthurian legends; it prints his own books and the work of little-known artists and writers. Among its books are joint works with the Icelandic painter Georg Guðni Hauksson.

In 2006 Saint Lawrence University awarded him an honorary doctorate. In October of that year he received the Gold Medal of the Province and the City of León in Spain, and in April 2010 he was made a Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog, the Danish royal order.