Viggo Mortensen

Viggo Mortensen (born October 20, 1958, New York City, New York, U.S.) is an American actor known for his striking demeanor and understated persuasiveness in roles ranging from shockingly brutal to heroic.

Mortensen’s mother was American and his father Danish. His early childhood was peripatetic, with stints in Venezuela and Denmark as well as Argentina, where he attended elementary school. After his parents divorced, he lived with his mother in her hometown of Watertown, New York. After graduating from high school in 1976, he attended St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, earning a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and government in 1980. He spent the next few years working at a variety of jobs in Britain, Spain, and Denmark. While employed at a movie house, Mortensen developed an interest in acting. He subsequently returned to the United States and studied acting in New York City.

Mortensen made his movie debut playing an Amish farmer in Witness (1985), and he won notice for his stage performance in a Los Angeles production of Bent (1987). He was cast in a number of minor movies, including Prison (1987) and Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990), before costarring as the bad brother in Sean Penn’s The Indian Runner (1991). In 1993 he portrayed a gangster in Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way. Mortensen later played a supporting role in the submarine-set Crimson Tide (1995) and was the trainer of Navy SEAL recruits in G.I. Jane (1997). He had developed a reputation for playing tough or damaged men when Peter Jackson cast him in the major role of the valiant Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy (2001, 2002, and 2003).

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Mortensen next played the swashbuckling hero of Hidalgo (2004), about a cross-desert horse race. He later earned acclaim for two films directed by David Cronenberg: A History of Violence (2005), in which he was cast as a small-town hero with a dark secret, and Eastern Promises (2007), about the Russian criminal underworld in London. For his work in the latter movie, Mortensen earned an Academy Award nomination for best actor. His subsequent films included the western Appaloosa (2008) and The Road (2009), an adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel. He portrayed Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method (2011), directed by Cronenberg, and Old Bull Lee/William S. Burroughs in On the Road (2012), based on the Jack Kerouac novel. For his performance as a man raising his family outside the bonds of society in Captain Fantastic (2016), Mortensen was again nominated for an Oscar, and he received his third nomination for his role as an Italian American bouncer hired as a driver for an African American classical pianist (Mahershala Ali) in Green Book (2018). Mortensen wrote, directed, and starred in Falling (2020), about a son attempting to care for his abrasive and unlikeable father who has dementia.

In 2022 Mortensen reunited with Cronenberg for Crimes of the Future, a “body-horror” film in which humans can grow new organs and largely feel no physical pain. Later that year the actor also appeared in Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives, which was based on the real-life rescue of a youth football (soccer) team from an underground cave.

In addition to acting, Mortensen created and published books of poetry and of photography, and he had exhibitions of his photographs and paintings. He also released several albums on which he sang and played keyboards. In 2002 he cofounded the independent publishing company Perceval Press.