Viggo Mortensen: How did the actor miss his first major role?

Not content with being an actor, artist, photographer and poet, Viggo Mortensen is also a director. Three years after Falling, his off-camera debut, he did it again with World’s End, a western dedicated to his mother in which he opposite Vicky Cripps.

While in Paris to promote the feature film, which hits theaters on May 1, the actor and director caught up with us on some key moments in his career. Including filming the end of this world.

Viggo Mortensen also talks about his first real-life film role opposite Harrison Ford in The Witness. A feature film he almost turned down, motivated by the idea of ​​shooting only one day, when an offer at a New York theater promised to work all summer.

in Cannes with The Lord of the Rings

But who knows what would have happened to his career if the agent hadn’t convinced him? Peter Weir, the director of Witness, for not giving him a bigger role? Could he be Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, which earned him his first ascent at Cannes in 2001, along with a few pictures?

Would he have collaborated as much with David Cronenberg, the filmmaker who most inspired him when he got behind the camera himself (so that the Shadow Promises director makes a cameo in Falling)? No one knows, but it may have been a close call for him to not become this exciting artist who revisited his career with us in pictures.

Comments collected by Maximilien Pierret in Paris on April 10, 2024 – Photo: Arthur Tourneret – Editing: Mehdi Delavant