His spirited but sensitive acting played an important role in a film that eventually ended up winning 11 Academy Awards. But Viggo Mortensen’s name still resonates across many fronts more than 20 years after the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Along with acting, the multi-faceted artist also composes music, writes scripts and directs films. All of these talents are interconnected in his western The Dead Don’t Hurt, which Mortensen presented to the audience personally in the Grand Hall on Saturday. Solly McLeod, the actor who portrayed the main villain in the film, was also on stage.
The first question from the audience inquired about Mortensen’s sources of inspiration. “It all started with a little girl in the forest. She is mischievous, a bit of a troublemaker, and her name is Vivienne. The inspiration for the character was my mother,” the actor revealed. Other viewers were also intrigued by the female perspective presented in the story unfolding in the sparsely populated 19th-century Nevada. “I told myself that if we were to be in the Wild West, a lawless environment, her story would be stronger. Rarely do we see a western where the man goes off to the war and we stick with the woman who stayed home,” he explained the film’s plot and backed it up with a powerful memory: “A week ago we screened the film in Ukraine. There were a lot of women, a lot of Viviennes, in the audience.”
While the actor with Danish descent was expected to direct the movie, compose the music and write the script, he ended up playing one of the lead roles by chance. “We lost an actor just before shooting. I took on the role with the blessing of Vicky Krieps (Vivienne). We just made the original character older and Danish,” he told the audience at the Grand Hall. At the end of the debate, Mortensen, a passionate rider, delighted a horsewoman in the audience with a frank confession: it was him sitting on the horse in all the riding shots.
