Viggo Mortensen is grilling me. I’ve just told him I loved his new film, The Dead Don’t Hurt, a gorgeous, female-focused Western that he wrote, directed, produced, scored and starred in. Usually, it’s the kind of gentle conversation starter that elicits something along the lines of: “Thanks.” Not so with Mortensen.
“When did you see it?” he asks first. About two days ago. “On a big screen?” No, on my laptop. “Oh,” he says, crestfallen. “Were you able to watch the whole thing, with the end credits and all of it?” Yes. “That’s good.” Oh god, is he about to test me? “And you had decent sound?” I consider lying, but those piercing blue eyes are making me feel like he would find out the truth somehow. He shakes his head. “Too bad.” Is it? “Yeah. It’s really… there’s a lot of details that you missed.”
If sitting across from Viggo Mortensen sounds like a terrifying prospect, then it sort of is. If you’ve seen him shooting a criminal in the head from point-blank range in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005), or stabbing a Chechen goon in the eye while fully naked in his Oscar-nominated turn in Eastern Promises (2007) – or even if you just know him as the fearless, brooding Aragorn in Lord of the Rings – you can imagine the intensity of his presence. Even the way he neatly piled some biscuits on the table between us as he arrived at the London hotel bar, and told me to help myself, felt vaguely frightening. But it quickly becomes clear that this quietly spoken, deep-thinking, slightly intimidating man is just someone who cares. A lot.
Especially about his work. If there is something that will help Mortensen step into the skin of his characters, he’ll do it. He slept outside in his costume for the first few days of The Lord of the Rings shoot. He slept outside again, this time in freezing temperatures and wrapped in a tarpaulin, for the 2009 survival film The Road. Ahead of playing a German professor collaborating with the Nazis in 2008’s Good, he drove around Germany and Poland visiting concentration camps. And given he seems to have done every job on The Dead Don’t Hurt except for catering, it’s not surprising he feels so protective over it.
Mortensen plays Holger Olsen, a Danish immigrant and the reluctant sheriff of a small town in the American West. When Olsen visits San Francisco, he falls in love with Vicky Krieps’ Vivienne, a quietly headstrong French Canadian who soon moves into his bare-bones cabin. But no sooner have they started to build a life together than Olsen decides to go and fight in the US civil war, leaving Vivienne to fend for herself in a town ruled by a corrupt landowner and his psychopath son. Where most Westerns would follow Olsen into battle, this one stays with Vivienne as she fights her own domestic war.
The film was loosely inspired by, and is dedicated to, Mortensen’s mother Grace. Grace raised Mortensen as a single parent in New York from when he was 11. Before then, he had lived mostly in Argentina, where his Danish father ran a chicken farm. Mortensen’s mother died in 2015, and during the pandemic, he had an image in his mind of her as a “strong-willed, independent little girl with lots of imagination”. This film, he says, was a way to examine who that little girl might have grown into if she lived “in a time and place dominated by a few unscrupulous men”.
“I was just curious,” says Mortensen, “what happens to the little girls and women when their partners or their dads go away to fight their masculine wars.” Vivienne doesn’t want Olsen to fight – “This is not your country,” she tells him – but he does anyway. “He goes for moral reasons,” says Mortensen, “like someone today might go to Ukraine even though they’re not Ukrainian. Like people went from this country to Spain in the 30s to fight in the Spanish Civil War, because it feels right on moral grounds.” He pauses. “That doesn’t mean that war is good. Every war is a mistake everywhere. It doesn’t matter how justified it is. Because the direct result of every war is destruction, tragedy, and untold lives that are affected for generations. The result of every war is negative.”
Mortensen has always been politically outspoken. He’s been a scathing critic of the Iraq War, of American imperialism, of Donald Trump, and, for decades now, Israel’s treatment of Palestine. But his films don’t tend to be overtly political.
As a film-maker, in fact, Mortensen has an extraordinary lightness of touch. The most extreme moments of The Dead Don’t Hurt are not shown but implied. There is one scene, which Mortensen is anxious that I not give away, in which an act of violence is inflicted on Vivienne. But as soon as it has begun, the scene cuts. We see only the aftermath, Vivienne sitting on her bed, an expression of devastation, rage and vulnerability on her face. Mortensen thinks it’s far more powerful than if we had seen the violence itself. “We could have spent two nights filming, but when you see her the next day, what you imagine is much more terrible than anything I could have filmed.”
Vivienne, says Mortensen, is “probably the strongest person in the movie” – which is presumably why some people have labelled this a “feminist Western”. It is certainly an anomaly – think of Westerns, and you think of men, guns, shoot-em-ups. “I was aware, because I’ve seen other Westerns, that it was unusual to have the lead character be a woman,” Mortensen concedes. “I realised it was even more unusual to stay with her when the man goes off to war.” But a “feminist Western”? That’s other people’s words, not his. “It’s a bit reductive,” he says. “I haven’t defined it that way and I don’t need to. It’s too simplistic. People like to put things in boxes, you know?”
And yet, the fact Mortensen has never claimed this to be a feminist Western hasn’t stopped people from criticising his feminist credentials. “I noticed a review where someone said it was fake feminism – that I was trying to come off as a heroic saviour of women, and that it was a half-assed effort and I didn’t go all the way,” he says, visibly irritated.
“First of all, when I’m writing a script, my point of departure isn’t ideological or political – I’m just telling a story.” He points out that he had lots of female heads of department, a female producer, and a female assistant director. “Not that that matters,” he adds.
“I never thought: ‘Oh, we’re writing a feminist story, I’ve got to go all the way.’ I don’t even know what that means.” He leans his famously dimpled chin on his hand, as he does often, exposing the small “H” tattoo on his wrist (a tribute to his now-36-year-old son Henry, who would scribble his initial over his father’s arm when he was learning to write). “I don’t know, maybe sometimes when people write reviews these days, they’re trying to stand out by saying something different,” he continues, “but to say it’s fake feminism… I don’t even know what that means.” Ultimately, he concludes, “just because you’re a man, you’re not disqualified from telling a woman’s story”.
Mortensen has had to defend himself from this kind of thing before. In his 2020 directorial debut Falling, he plays a gay man whose homophobic father is in the latter stages of dementia. At the time, some criticised Mortensen’s decision, as an ostensibly straight man (he has a female partner, Pan’s Labyrinth star Ariadna Gil, but he’s never publicly defined his sexuality), to take on a gay role. But by that logic, he tells me now, “so many good performances in the last 30 or 40 years would have been disqualified. ‘You’re not that – you can’t play that.’ That’s ridiculous on some level. I mean yes, there are limits, but it’s not black and white.”
The waitress arrives, and Mortensen orders a black coffee, then changes his mind. “A flat white, maybe?” he asks politely. “With oat milk?” I’m reminded of something I read – that on the set of Lord of the Rings, he was so courteous and polite that people called him “no ego Viggo”? Is that true? He smiles. “I never heard that, but if they say that…” He trails off.
“I think I’m considered someone who’s reliable. I show up on time, I’m prepared, and I like collaborating. I’m not the sort of actor or director who’s like, ‘I’ve got a way I want to do this and I’m not going to listen to anybody.’ On Lord of the Rings, there were lots of us there together for a long time.” All three films were shot concurrently, in New Zealand, over a period of 14 months. “Everybody enjoyed going and watching the others work, even when they weren’t working. Because you’re part of this, and there’s a communal aspect to it. Usually a movie is better if people have communicated well.”
Lord of the Rings – for which Mortensen was brought in last minute, to replace another actor who’d been fired a few days into filming – made Mortensen a star in his forties. He could have ridden the wave of big-budget blockbusters after that, but that’s not his style. He turned down the role of Wolverine in X-Men, and said no to parts in Batman Begins, Man of Steel and Joker, too. Partly because he’s not particularly interested in fame – “If I’m not working on a movie, I’m not really part of that world,” he tells me – and partly because he just can’t bear to commit to a film his heart isn’t in.
“There are people that justify it. ‘Well I’m going to do this gigantic job, even though in my heart I know it’s kind of generic, but they’re paying me a fortune…’ But then it comes time to talk about it, and you pay the price, because what are you going to talk about? You either have to pretend it’s great, or talk about – I don’t know – pranks or mishaps during the shoot. For some people it’s worth it. For me, I would be uncomfortable. Life is short. If you’re going to do something that takes a lot of time and energy, it might as well be something promising.”
‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’ is available to rent or buy on digital on Monday