Analyze This

Well, we know who to blame for the Twilight phenomenon. While Danish-American actor Viggo Mortensen had been making waves in the film industry since the early ‘90s, giving stunning performances in films like The Indian Runner and Carlito’s Way, it was a last-minute casting call that turned him into an international star in 1999.

History hinges on moments like these. Mortensen was the eleventh-hour replacement for Stuart Townsend in Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, and his performance as a handsome, intensely brooding Aragorn made it socially acceptable to drool over a fantasy character. Nothing has been the same since. Of course, this fiercely intelligent actor is used to sending ripples through not only cultural spheres, but the political world too. As well as being an actor, poet, photographer, painter, musician and co-founder of Perceval Publishing, Mortensen is also a political activist.
Four years ago he was a staunch supporter of Presidential hopeful Dennis Kuchinich, a liberal Democrat who famously brought articles of impeachment against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. When Kuchinch failed to win the Democratic nomination, the actor settled for supporting Obama, but was wary of the hope-meister. He said at the time: “Both he and (Hillary) Clinton have so many corporate ties that are unsettling to me. Perhaps he has fewer. And the movement that’s behind him may plague his conscience so much that I think he’ll get us out of Iraq sooner than Hillary Clinton will. So, that’s our best chance.”
But we’ll come to that later. Let’s start by telling you about his new role, as Sigmund Freud in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method.
A Dangerous Method marks your third collaboration with David Cronenberg, who directed you in A History Of Violence and Eastern Promises. What do you get from working with each other?
“I think he knows that I come as prepared as I can, that I do as much research as he does and that I enjoy what I do. He can count on me to completely dedicate myself to the role, to show up prepared, attentive, and open to what he’s going to say. And I know things are going to be done professionally and that he can work and communicate brilliantly with actors, and will also be really well prepared”.
Well-prepared seems like an understatement – is it true you and Cronenberg traded over 40 e-mails about the exact type of cigar Freud smoked?
“More, probably! David and I both strive for authenticity. It’s a passion of his, which makes him wonderful to work with. He’ll turn up with rare volumes of books that did actually belong to Freud and the production designer will be staring at him in awe saying, ‘Where did you find this?!’ It’s about being as true as possible. Also, it’s Freud’s cigar. The subtext is endless. We had to get it right!”
It was one of the few roles where you play a talkative character. Do you prefer playing the strong, silent, physical roles?
“These are different hues on your palette. The best thing an actor can be is flexible, adaptable. Every director you work with is going to be different. The same director will be different on each project. I’d never worked with Keira (Knightley), I’d never worked with Michael (Fassbender), and it was a question of getting comfortable with them and them getting comfortable with me. You can look at it as, ‘Oh damn, I have to go work with new people’, or you can look at is as a force that challenges you to do a better job or a different job than you did before. Circumstances will be different, and my motto in acting – and in life! – is ‘adapt and overcome’. So while the dialogue-heavy script and the extensive expression through letter-writing was a facet of acting I hadn’t really explored before, I relished that opportunity to do something new.”
They say inspiration can be found right under your nose if you choose to look – is it true your director shares the same dry wit as Freud, and so became your muse?
“Yeah, there’s definitely something similar there! David’s very intelligent, like Freud was, very thoughtful, very good manners, very polite. But he has a very incisive wit and great sense of humour. Like Freud, David will often say something scathingly funny about himself or his circumstances or others, without even cracking a smile sometimes. So if you don’t catch it, he won’t even bother explaining it to you. He’ll continue on. But if you do get it, it will be bitingly funny because it’s so dry – either way, he keeps you on your toes! And in that sense, there’s a similarity there. The descriptions of Freud from his contemporaries mention he was witty and very engaging and could be scathingly funny. But if he felt cornered or insecure he could be quite cutting, very cruel with his wit.”
The script brilliantly captures the defensive aspect of his humour. Do you think that was also because he was Jewish in a time that was extremely difficult for his people?
“Absolutely. People think Germany was the epicentre of anti-Semitism, but Austrians took to Nazi ideas and anti-Semitism much more readily than the Germans, and so for Freud, growing up as a Jew meant having to be able to deflect a lot of very distressing ideas about his culture. And it was such a repressive atmosphere generally, in terms of religion, sex but also free-thinking generally – censorship laws were so restrictive in Vienna.”
What was the effect of that?
“This repressive atmosphere was both an inspiration in his work, born as it was out of a quest for understanding, but also his personality, and as you said, his wit. His ironic tone, his mastery of puns and language was both a personal self-defence mechanism and a way of getting around censorship and anti-Semitism. Wit and wordplay became very powerful tools in his life.”
I’ve heard you refer to Freud’s assertion that, “Everywhere I go, a poet has been there before me”, as one of your favourite quotes, alongside Joseph Campbell who said that, “The privilege of a lifetime is being yourself.” As a poet and an actor, you seem to have the best of both worlds.
“Yeah, I think they go together. Campbell was an adept of Jung, he tended more towards the mystical in some sense. Freud was more of a stoic, he aimed to come to an understanding of your own flaws, of your own imperfections, of your fate in life. Which in the end is to die, depressing as that sounds! He wasn’t here to ‘cure’ anyone, he was here to help people understand themselves. I think he sought to understand himself, his whole life. He’s someone who suffered illness for many years and died in an admirably stoic way I think.”
Through poetry, art and music, are you seeking to understand yourself? Or is it a form of escapism?
“It’s a form of escapism, but also making sense of things that don’t make sense a lot of the time. Like: what are we doing here, why are we here, why can’t we stay here, why do we have so many problems getting along with others and with ourselves? It’s a way of paying attention and striving to figure out something you’re never fully going to figure out. It’s about what makes you tick, and why people do the strange things they do to each other and to themselves and the world. It’s this nurture Vs. nature debate – looking at how animals are so savage with each other and seeing if we’ve really come that far from that, if we’re practicing survival of the fittest under a slightly more civilised veneer.”
You always had this preoccupation with human nature and mortality, even as a child, and were constantly fearful you wouldn’t have time to accomplish all you wanted to do? Now you’re a father, have your fears of mortality been assuaged somewhat?
“Ha! I think passing on your spirit to children is a way to somehow continue on – well it depends on whether you accept the responsibility of parenthood or not. I accepted, and have fulfilled my desire for new challenges and growth. Because in a way I think that makes me more compassionate than I might be, when I see my son, I see how the things he goes through remind me of things that I went through. I want him to be happy. I want him to be well at all times.”
Isn’t that the impossible dream?
“Inevitably he’ll be sad sometimes and wounded. That’s true. It’s part of being alive and human. He, like I, will live, and everything that happens between being born and dying isn’t all rosy! So someone who’s your own flesh and blood, who you care about... it hurts to watch them go through the things they have to go through. In the end you have to step back and let them live their lives and make their mistakes. It interests me, this notion of human connection… but I also love being a dad!”
How do you think President Obama has done in the White House?
“Well, I’d rather see him than any of the Republicans that are his potential rivals in the election this year, anyway!”
They are a scary bunch of people…
“Indeed. I think that all the fears I had about Obama’s corporate ties and his aggressive militarism have, if anything, been intensified and have sadly come true. And there are people who say, ‘Hey, look at the positive!’ I think George Clooney had a difference of opinion with Matt Damon recently. There was a big thing where Matt Damon said he was disappointed with Obama and Clooney said something to the effect of – not that anyone should really care about what an actor says about anything over anyone else, it’s another opinion – but George was saying ‘Hey, let’s give him a break, I’m tired of people putting down Obama’. But you know, any democracy is about the free exchange of ideas and about resistance to the status quo. That’s how I see it anyway – if you want to be a democratic citizen you question yourself and you question others constantly. It never ends. It’s like any relationship: you have to work at it constantly in order to grow, you can’t accept what is”.
What did you think of Obama’s recent State of the Union address?
“It was disappointing that there was no mention of – which wouldn’t have been politically convenient, but – the giant war on drugs and the narco-traffic problems in Mexico and other places – Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, etc. – where a lot more people are being killed than are in Iraq or Afghanistan. And he made really no mention of the other countries in the Americas. To me, as someone who was raised in South America and has a lot of connection to and interest in Hispanic culture and society, I found it remarkable that it was absent in his discourse. That’s a huge part of the population that’s Hispanic, that speaks Spanish, that he’s ignoring.”
My hope checked out a bit when he opened with: ‘For the first time in two decades Osama Bin Laden is not a threat to this country’.
“Yeah, but as we know, that stuff sells. It’s like Bush in his inane way going around shouting, ‘I’m a war-time President, I’m a war-time President!’, because it makes peopl0e think he’s Presidential and tough and smart and a red-blooded all-American. And Obama’s obviously feeling a need to, in a PR sense, establish the fact that he’s no weakling and will stand up for American interests abroad and all that. There are many times more covert assassinations and illegal detentions going on under Obama than even under Bush. That’s very alarming to me. And I can see why he wants to make political capital out of it, but it’s nonetheless disturbing. And I think damaging in the long run to long-term US interests and security.”
Here’s hoping he beats out right-wingers like Santorum anyway...
“Maybe he will do better next term when he’s got nothing to lose, but that idea of, ‘Well I’m going to make these concessions now’. It’s like the actor who says, ‘Well, I’m going to make ten studio movies in a row to get my name out there so I can then do these artistic things’. I think you get in the habit of making compromises and that changes who you are, in a way, and makes it that much harder to come back to what you were doing, and do really good things – either artistically or politically.”
So you’re not exactly optimistic.
“I don’t expect that if he gets re-elected – though I’d rather, I suppose, see him there than most of the others – I don’t expect him to change that much. He’s too much in bed with Wall Street and the defence industry and the insurance companies – and too in debt to them – to change that much. I would be surprised if he did radically better things during his next four years”.
What about your future? There are rumblings of a possible Eastern Promises sequel?
“That’s in the works. It’s a possibility definitely, as the story left off at a point where you could easily revisit this character and explore how newfound power has affected him. David unfortunately isn’t like Woody Allen, he’s not given the privilege of shooting a movie every year, though he’d probably like to. But a sequel could be very interesting.”
Though your role as Nikolai in Eastern Promises earned you an Oscar nomination in 2007, I remember you weren’t overly excited at the prospect?
“I don’t do much of it but there are people out there who make it a year-round occupation engaging in self-promotion because it’s good business. People who either love it or have come to grips with the fact that it’s good for them and good for business to constantly promote themselves and their movies because it does work. Mediocre movies can often be rewarded and other movies that don’t campaign for it in that way aren’t.”
They often get it completely wrong.
“That’s right. I would say that A Dangerous Method not being even on the map in the long list of nominations for the BAFTAS was an incredible oversight. I’d like to think it’s a matter of promotion and people not having seen the movie. I’d hate to think it was because of ignorance and a lack of personal imagination on the part of the voters. I have to hope it’s because not enough people saw it or were encouraged to see it – and hopefully that will change!”
Well, I’ll go see it again...
“Ha, thanks. And best of luck to Ireland in the Six Nations!”
 
A Dangerous Method is in cinemas from February 10.