At 67, Viggo Mortensen Talks Candidly About Sir Christopher Lee 

 

 

 

On the set of The Return of the King, there was a day when an 81-year-old actor stopped Peter Jackson midirection and said something that made the entire crew go quiet. It had to do with the war, the real one. And standing a few feet away, saying nothing, absorbing every word, was a 43-year-old actor who had built his entire career on chasing exactly that kind of truth.

 His name was Vgo Mortonson. The older actor was Christopher Lee. At 67, Mortensson has finally started talking plainly about what that man actually meant to him. Vgo Mortensson was born in New York City in 1958, but his childhood had almost nothing to do with New York. By the time he was three, his family had already lived in Venezuela, Denmark, and Argentina, the last of which he came to love so completely that Spanish became his second native tongue.

 His parents divorced when he was 11. He came back to New York with his mother and brothers, eventually graduating from St. Lawrence University in 1980. He drifted for years afterward, the UK, Spain, Denmark, odd jobs before going back to New York thinking he was auditioning for a play. It turned out to be an acting school.

The mistake became his career. His first film role was a small part in 1985’s Witness opposite Harrison Ford. It was not much, but Mortensson treated every role from that point forward, no matter how small or forgettable the surrounding film, as something to disappear into completely.

 In Prison, a low-budget 1987 horror film, he shook so violently in one scene that he broke a chair and ran through freezing water in nothing but his underwear. Because faking it felt dishonest, critics barely noticed, he kept doing it anyway. Through the late 80s and into the 90s, that pattern repeated. Film after film, roll after roll, most of them small, several of them genuinely strange.

 Leatherface, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3, playing one of the Cannibal family. The Reflecting Skin in 1990 gave him real critical notice for the first time, a horror film about a boy convinced his neighbor is a vampire. Then came the Indian runner Shaun Penn’s directorial debut in which Mortonson played a violent Vietnam veteran with such unsettling intensity.

By 1993 he was working constantly but earning almost nothing from it. Rolls in boiling point Carito’s way opposite Alpuchccino American Yakuza. He later admitted he took some of these parts simply because he was broke. Critics singled him out anyway, wondering openly why an actor this good had not been more widely recognized.

 Crimson Tide in 1995 gave him his biggest platform yet, playing a submarine weapons officer opposite Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman. By the time he played the Navy Seal commander in Ridley Scott’s GI Jane in 1997, directors already knew him as someone who did not simply read for a part. He interviewed real Navy Seals for months and skipped the cast’s official boot camp, which made his castmates genuinely resent him on set, a reaction he had deliberately engineered since the character needed to be resented.

 The film did not review well. His commitment once again was what people remembered. By 1999, he had built an enormous body of work and almost no fame. He was the actor that directors loved and audiences had mostly never heard of. And then with almost no warning, everything changed. The Lord of the Rings trilogy had been in trouble before Mortonson ever entered the picture.

 Peter Jackson had cast a different actor as Aragorn. Stuart Townsend, a young Irish actor riding the success of About Adam, and had spent weeks preparing him for the role. But something was wrong almost from the start. Townzen did not want to rehearse. He did not want to learn horseback riding or sword choreography. His refrain, repeated to anyone who pushed him, was, “You’ll get it on the day.

” Ian Mckllen eventually pulled him aside and asked him directly whether he even wanted to be there. By the second day of actual filming, Jackson turned to his producer and said the words that ended Townzen’s tenure as Aragorn. I don’t think I can work with Stuart. The studio scrambled.

 Jason Patrick was considered and dismissed as not a big enough name. Russell Crowe, fresh off Gladiator, passed because he did not want to be typ cast in period epics again. That left Vgo Mortonson, an outdoorsman, a trained horseman, a man who already knew European folklore well enough that the mythological foundations of Tolken’s work were not foreign to him.

 But Mortensson almost said no. He had a young son, Henry, and the role meant months away in New Zealand at a point in his son’s life when he genuinely did not want to be absent for that long. He turned the offer over in his head without much enthusiasm, the way a father does when a job conflicts with the thing that actually matters most to him.

 It was Henry who changed everything. He was already a serious fan of the books, and when he found out what his father was hesitating over, he did not let it go quietly. “Dad,” he said, more or less, “will you deny me the opportunity for my father to be arrogorn.” Mortensson has told that story many times since, always with the same note of disbelief, at how simply his son cut through everything he had been agonizing over.

 He had not even read the books himself at that point. He said yes because his son asked him to, not because he understood yet what he was saying yes to. He was on a plane to New Zealand within days. He arrived on set with no rehearsal time, no relationship with his fellow cast members, and no real understanding yet of who Aragorn was supposed to be.

Jackson himself later admitted that in Mortensson’s first scenes, particularly the introduction at the Prancing Pony, where Frodo and Sam sit waiting for an Aragorn, who had not technically existed in the production until days earlier, you could tell the actor was still finding his footing.

 Many fans who have studied that scene closely have pointed out since that the uncertainty Mortensson was visibly carrying in his first days on set actually deepened the performance rather than undermining it. Aragorn at that point in the story is a man in hiding from his own destiny, uneasy in his own skin, reluctant to be seen for who he really is.

 an actor who had just been thrown into the role with days to prepare and zero time to settle into false confidence gave Jackson something more honest than rehearsal ever could have. The hesitation in Mortensson’s eyes in that first scene was not a flaw to be corrected. It was by accident exactly right. It did not take long.

 By the confrontation with the ring wraiths at Weathertop, something clicked into place that Jackson could see in real time. Mortensson embracing the anim animalistic, haunted quality underneath Aragorn’s nobility. The iconic shot of Aragorn swinging a torch into the camera lens was entirely improvised. Mortensson had found him, and then he did not stop.

 He trained on horseback until he bonded so deeply with his horse he bought it after filming and bought Arwin’s horse too for Liv Tyler’s stunt double when nobody else would meet the bidding price. He insisted on a real steel sword rather than rubber or aluminum, training with it constantly, even offset, which led to more than one uncomfortable conversation with local police.

 The fight choreographer called him the best swordsman he had ever trained. He broke two toes kicking a helmet, and his actual scream of pain made the final cut. He snapped a tooth at Helm’s Deep and visited a dentist in full costume and fake blood rather than break continuity. Jackson once spent 30 minutes in conversation with him, addressing him the entire time as Aragorn without realizing he had never used Mortensson’s actual name.

 It was in this atmosphere, total almost obsessive commitment to the reality underneath the fantasy that Mortensson found in Christopher Lee something he had never quite encountered before. A person for whom the realism was not a method. It was memory. Christopher Lee was born in 1922 in Belgravia, London to an Italian Contessa and a British army officer.

 And by the time he played Sarroman, he had already lived an entire previous life that most of his younger castmates knew almost nothing about. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1941, served through the entirety of World War II, and rose to flight lieutenant as an intelligence officer. He had also, by various accounts, he discussed only in fragments, been involved with British special forces in operations dangerous enough that he would simply decline mid-sentence to say more.

 Producer Barry Osborne, present for the Sarroman death scene conversation, later said only that Lee had been part of British Secret Service or OSS or whatever they were called. An answer that confirmed nobody on the production fully knew and that Lee preferred it that way. He spoke seven languages. He had met JRR Tolken personally decades earlier, making him the only person involved in Jackson’s productions who had ever actually spoken with the author.

 He read The Lord of the Rings cover to cover once every year, a private ritual kept for most of his adult life. He had wanted to play Gandalf. He said so plainly in later interviews. Of course, I would have loved to play Gandalf, but by the time Jackson was casting, Lee was approaching 80, and the physical demands of Gandalf’s role, the riding and the fighting, were simply beyond what his body could reliably do.

 Saramon required less of both. He took the role that fit what his body could still give, and he gave it everything that was left. The two men, the 81-year-old war veteran with seven languages and a personal memory of Tolken himself and the 43-year-old actor who insisted on carrying a real sword because rubber felt like a lie found each other in the quiet spaces between takes.

 While other cast members played cards, Mortonson and Lee would find a corner and speak in German Spanish. Sometimes old Norse languages both had learned not for the film but because they had always wanted to. They were not talking about Hollywood. They were talking about the mythological roots Tolken himself had drawn from and Lee found in Mortensson, something he apparently found in very few younger collaborators.

 Someone who understood the material as inheritance, not entertainment. Lee noticed too the sword. When Mortensson refused the lighter prop weapons and trained constantly with a heavy steel blade forged by armorer Peter Lion, Lee, a man who had trained extensively in stage combat and likely performed more screen sword fights than any actor in film history, watched closely and remarked to the cinematographer that Mortensson possessed a natural combative instinct, something rare in action.

 actors who train for a role rather than already having it inside them. For Mortonson, a nod from Christopher Lee was not a casual compliment. It was closer to a verdict from the only person on set qualified to deliver one. And then there was the death scene, the day Jackson tried to direct Lee’s scream. And Lee explained unhurried and absolute exactly why the direction was wrong.

 He had heard once precisely what a man sounds like when a blade goes into his back from behind. The air does not allow for a scream. It is forced out in a single choked exhale. Jackson, to his credit, did not argue. He let Lee play it the way Lee knew it had to be played because Lee was not guessing.

 He was performing a fact paid for decades earlier in circumstances none of the cast around him could imagine. Mortensson has said in the years since that what Lee brought to that set was a kind of weight no drama school could teach. The feeling of being near someone who carried real war inside a fantasy story about war, who could distinguish instinctively between what was theatrical and what was true.

For an actor who had spent his career trying to manufacture that exact distinction through sheer physical commitment, watching Christopher Lee simply already possess it as lived history rather than performance choice was its own kind of education. There was warmth underneath the gravity, too. Lee, despite decades of villain roles that made him a global symbol of cinematic menace, Dracula in seven Hammer films, Scaramanga in a Bond picture, Soman himself had a genuinely sensitive artistic temperament, he sang. He had

recorded opera. He would in his 80s even record heavy metal albums purely because the idea amused him. Mortensson, who founded his own small publishing company, Perl Press, specifically to fund art the mainstream industry ignored, poetry, photography, music that would never sell, recognized a kindred instinct immediately.

 two men who had built enormous, very different public reputations while quietly pursuing creative work that had everything to do with who they actually were underneath it. Christopher Lee died on June 7th, 2015 at a hospital in London, 10 days after his 93rd birthday. Peter Jackson wrote afterward that visiting Lee in London with his wife Gita, 54 years of marriage by then, had been one of the genuine pleasures of his own life.

 Hours spent listening to stories Jackson knew he would never hear the entirety of. In the years after The Lord of the Rings, Mortensson did exactly what people who had watched his career up to that point should have expected. He refused to cash in. He turned down other franchise offers, calling many of them predictable and underwritten.

 [clears throat] He declined to return as Aragorn for The Hobbit, since the character did not appear in that book, and adding him would have been the kind of compromise he had spent his whole career avoiding. Instead, he went looking for harder, stranger, more personal work. In 2005, he made a history of violence with David Croninberg, the first of four collaborations with the director and called it the best film he had ever made.

 Two years later came Eastern Promises in which he played a Russian mob enforcer so convincingly that he traveled across Russia without a translator, studied prison tattoo culture in obsessive detail, and left Russian news playing on a loop in his hotel rooms simply to absorb the accent. The role earned him his first Oscar nomination.

 He kept choosing difficulty over comfort. For the road in 2009, adapting Cormarmac McCarthy’s bleak postapocalyptic novel, he starved himself down roughly 30 lbs and slept in his character’s filthy clothes between takes until he was once mistaken for a homeless man and asked to leave a store during filming. for Captain Fantastic in 2016.

 He played an off-grid father raising six children with a warmth and intensity that earned him a second Oscar nomination. And then in 2018 came Greenbook in which he transformed himself in the opposite direction entirely, gaining 20 pounds to play Tony Lip, the real life Italian-American driver who chauffeured black pianist Don Shirley through the segregated American South in 1962.

He gained the weight mostly on pizza and pasta, insisted on actually eating in nearly every food scene rather than faking it, and folded an entire pizza into quarters on camera because the real Tony Lip used to do exactly that. The film won best picture. Mortonson earned his third Oscar nomination.

 Whatever you do, his character says at one point, do it 100%. When you work, work. When you laugh, [sighs] laugh. When you eat, eat like it’s your last meal. It might as well have been his own personal credo delivered through someone else’s mouth. None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened because Mortensson needed the validation. He had Aragorn.

He could have spent the rest of his career playing variations of a beloved hero and never wanted for work again. He chose instead exactly the kind of relentless, specific, occasionally uncomfortable commitment that Christopher Lee had modeled for him on a New Zealand film set two decades earlier.

 the conviction that the truth of a thing matters more than the comfort of pretending. Mortensson has spoken about Christopher Lee with the reverence of an actor describing not a colleague but a living artifact, a man who carried real history into a story about invented violence and used that knowledge to make the fiction more honest.

 Aragorn carries an almost unbearable reverence for the kings who came before him. Men whose sacrifices shaped a world he inherited and did not fully understand until he lived inside it himself. Watching Mortensson’s performance with this context, it is not hard to see where some of that reverence came from. It did not require imagination.

 The king who came before him was standing 20 feet away between takes speaking quietly in old Norse carrying memories he would only ever share in pieces. Vgo Mortensson never let the Lord of the Rings become the peak of his career the way it might have for almost anyone else. But of everything the trilogy gave him, the horses he bought, the sword he still owns, the career that followed, what he chooses to talk about now at 67, is an 81-year-old man in a wizard’s robe who knew exactly what it sounded like when someone was stabbed in the back and

was generous enough to share what else he knew with the one young actor on set, paying close enough attention to understand the gift he was being given. Here is the question worth sitting with today. Is there someone in your life who taught you something true simply by being who they actually were without ever trying to teach you anything at all? Tell us who that was.

 We will see you in the next