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Feb.27,2005 -Mar.6,2005 |
Return of the Handsome King
Aragorn actor Viggo Mortensen rides again in real-life tale about Frank T. Hopkins Hidalgo
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2004-03-07
Viggo Mortensen is every bit as gentle and soft-spoken as the soulful warrior king Aragorn he plays in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Although his long locks have been replaced with a reddish crop, and he's visibly exhausted from this publicity tour, the American-born actor nevertheless manages to exude comfortable sex appeal and charm.
Viggo worked steadily long before the Rings, the films that have skyrocketed him to superstardom, but mostly in supporting roles and rarely in major films. For every A Perfect Murder or Crimson Tide, he made duds such as Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III or Demi Moore's G.I. Jane.
Now he stars in Joe Johnston's Hidalgo, where he plays Frank T. Hopkins, a real-life 1890s cowboy who races his beloved mustang, Hidalgo, against larger Arabians in the Ocean of Fire - a punishing 3,000-mile endurance contest in the Arabian desert. The old-fashioned action-adventure film, costing $90 million, also stars legendary Egyptian actor Omar Sharif.
Tandem talked to 46-year-old Mortensen when he was in Toronto recently.
Now that the Lord of the Rings saga is over, how do you feel about the experience?
"I valued it, I learned from it. It allowed me to explore further things that already interested me: mythology, history, certain values - the idea of compassion, the idea of community, common ground, the idea of something like the United Nations - that sort of thing. I value that. But I mean to have to literally play Aragorn or to have to talk about Aragorn as I have done a lot... I was happy doing it, it was a good story, well told. I need good stories like that. To some degree, Hidalgo is a continuation, is a similar kind of quest story. Any good story requires some kind of ordeal, some kind of rite of passage. Again that's what this story is about, quite a different person I'm playing; someone who hasn't traveled all over the world, doesn't understand all the languages of the world, customs, someone who along with the audience is learning a lot on the way. But also someone who is at least curious about it which is the first step to being open and to learning about one's place in the world. Yes, it's nice to have done that stuff to a degree because it made such a mark. It was such a popular movie trilogy."
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