People behind the characters!!!

Elijah Wood   Billy Boyd   Dominic Monaghan   Sean Astin   Ian Holm   Liv Tyler   Christopher Lee   Sean Bean   John Rhys Davis   Cate Blanchett   Viggo Mortensen   Hugo Weaving

Viggo Mortensen	'What is Aragorn like?' Viggo Mortensen asks rhetorically. 'He is someone who is self-reliant and a little reclusive.' It is tepting to see parallels between the player and the role: Mortensen is perfectly content to spend days with just his own company and admits to being happier amoung trees than around people. Born in manhatten, New your, Mortensen'd family travelled extensively, living in Venezuela, Argentina and Denmark (his father is danish) so that, by an early age, he and his two younger brothers had developed a knack for adapting to new and different surroundings. He feels a particular affinity, therefore, with the character Aragorn, who, in the book, is first encountered in the guise of a wandering ranger known as 'strider.' Mortensen's role in The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy is complex and demanding: When Frodo first meets him at the Prancing Pony Inn at Bree, he is mysterious, seemingly sinister figure who seems to knows an alarming amount about Mr.Baggins and the mission that is taking him out of the Shire. As the story unfolds, however, 'Strider' is revealed to be Aragorn II, the uncrowned king of the race of men in Middle Earth. The fate of the Ring-bearer, it becomes clear, is in extricable linked to Aragorn's own destiny. The actor has indicated that he identifies esily with characters who finds themselves set apart from those around them as Aragorn does. However, in a career spanning more than thirty films, Mortensen has played a wide range of roles, from the romatic suitors of Nicole Kidman in Portrait of a lady and Dianne Lane in A walk on the Moon, to an assortment of villians and hard men. Early performances by Mortensen in films by Jonathan Demme and Woody Allen ended up on the cutting floor, but his eventual debut in Peter Weir's witness created an immediate awareness of his acting talent and, over the ensuring years, he came to be seen in such in such diverse films as he Indian Rinner, Boiling Point, The prohecy, Carlito's Way, GI Jane, a Perfect Murder and Psycho. Although few cinema audiences would have been aware of the facts, all the paintings and photographs seen on the set for the artist's studio in A perfect Murder were by Mortensen himself. It is scarecly surprising that the actoris now frequently referred to as a Renaisance Man, since not onlu is a painter, but also a published poet, whose multimedia books and CDs include Ten Last night, Recent Forgeries and The Other Parade. Viggo Mortensen approached the role of Aragorn both as an actor who responds to physical challenges, welcoming the oppertunity to do his own riding and fighting, and as a poet, reacting to the symbolism in Tolkien's myth: 'Aragorn is deeply aware of the burden of his heritage and he carries the knowledge that, all too soon, he will have to reveal his true self in order to play his part in the fight against Sauron. That burden, that knowledge is what shapes and colours his perceptions.'

I have linked to other Viggo sites so you can find out more about the human fighter!!! Viggo Mortensen