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Viggo Mortensen

March 10, 2012 by · Comments Off on Viggo Mortensen 

Viggo Mortensen, A dangerous method indeed! Viggo Mortensen played with fire Thursday night when he wrapped himself in a Montreal Canadiens flag while on the home turf of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

The 53-year-old actor was posing with his Genie Award for best-supporting actor for “A Dangerous Method” when he wrapped himself in the Habs flag to pledge his support for the Montreal hockey team.

No doubt he was also “teasing” Toronto Maple Leafs fans, the same way he did last year at the Toronto International Film Festival when he gave co-star Keira Knightley a Guy Lafleur jersey during the premiere of the David Cronenberg film, just to irritate the Toronto-born director.

Mortensen first went head-to-head with Cronenberg when he wore his Habs jersey on the set of his 2005 film “A History of Violence” — the same jersey he hid underneath his armour while filming the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. No doubt he skipped cleaning it when he wore it again on the set of the post-apocalyptic film “The Road” in 2009.

But how did the Montreal hockey team become the favourite of a New York actor who currenly lives in Idaho? Mortensen told Canadiens magazine three years ago that it’s all thanks to Radio-Canada.

VIGGO MORTENSEN

November 25, 2011 by · Comments Off on VIGGO MORTENSEN 

VIGGO MORTENSEN, Mortensen goes against type to portray Sigmund Freud in David Cronenberg’s new film. Chris Lee talked to the alpha-male action hero about what made him put down his dukes for the role.

Never mind his A-list status, let’s talk onomatopoeia. For most film fans, just saying the words “Viggo Mortensen” inevitably conjures certain images associated with alpha-male action herodom: Viggo wielding a broadsword, valiantly shepherding Hobbits across a treacherous sweep of Middle Earth in the blockbuster Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Viggo covered in prison tats, issuing a vicious, butt-n*ked beat-down in the Russian mobster drama Eastern Promises. Maybe even Viggo caked with grime, pushing a rickety shopping cart and battling cannibal zombie-types in the postapocalyptic tear-jerker The Road.

But Viggo as Sigmund Freud?

Portraying the founding father of the talking cure in the psychosexual drama A Dangerous Method (which reaches theaters in limited release today), the Danish-American actor doesn’t so much as swat a fly. Instead, he engages in beetle-browed academic debates and puffs on cigars in book-lined studies, limping through Switzerland on the way to establishing modern psychoanalysis. It raises the question: what kind of role is that for one of filmdom’s most virile and square-of-jaw ass-kickers?

“I thought it was an odd idea too,” Mortensen acknowledged, sipping yerba mate from his personal gourd at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. “Because I had the same notion that everybody has of what Freud looked like: this frail, old, gaunt, white-haired man. Very rigid, formal. With these piercing brown eyes.”

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