Viggo Mortensen on the inspiration behind his latest movie, The Dead Don't Hurt

Viggo Mortensen’s latest project tells the story of a free-thinking woman in a world run by men, writes Esther McCarthy

Thu, 06 Jun, 2024 - 21:00

We know him best as the charismatic star of movies like Eastern Promises, Green Book and The Lord of the Rings films.

But for his latest movie, Viggo Mortensen goes behind the camera for the second time in his career, writing and directing a tough and tender Western told from the perspective of its female protagonist.

The result is The Dead Don’t Hurt, starring Vicky Krieps as a woman who must fend for herself when the man she loves goes to fight in the Civil War.

He was inspired to do so, he says, by memories of his mother, and he had images of her in his mind when he first began to write the screenplay.

“The first image I had when I started to write was of this little girl, which is based on what I know about my mother and her personality but also what she was like as a little girl,” says Mortensen. “And the place where she grew up, near that forest of maples and red oaks and black walnuts in the Northeast of the United States, literally on the border with Canada.”

As his story took shape, he became interested in telling the story of a woman who was independent minded and free in her thinking, but encountering a world dominated by men. The resulting film is a Western, in which Krieps plays Vivienne, a woman who leaves an unhappy marriage for the love of fellow immigrant Holger (Mortensen), only to fight for her survival when he goes to war.

Viggo Mortensen & Vicky Krieps in The Dead Don't Hurt Picture: Signature Entertainment/Marcel Zyskind

Instead of going with him, the audience stays with her, pushing against a common trope of the genre. “To place this story on the western frontier in the United States, a place in time where society was relatively lawless and dominated not just generally by men, but specifically by a few powerful unscrupulous men who were not averse to using violence to achieve their goals, I thought that would present a greater challenge,” he says.

“I saw a vacuum, a lack of stories about women like her. I don’t think that Vivienne was unique. I mean, she is unique like any person is, but she’s essentially an ordinary woman very much of her time who has an ordinary decency and ordinary sort of courage, a very strong interior life.

“She’s strong. In fact, psychologically, she’s probably the strongest character in the story. There were probably lots of women like her, we just haven’t seen their stories.”

There is a tender romance at the heart of the story as the two leads form a connection. But as he developed the screenplay, Mortensen felt compelled to focus on his female protagonist. He was also interested in exploring the impact of war on what was a relatively new relationship.

“What is it like after any long absence where you’ve been separated from that person, actually for much longer than you got to know them in the first place? That’s not going to be automatic. Some adjustments have to be made in both parties for any relationship to prosper.

“That’s the strength of their relationship and of this love story, that they both show at least some curiosity about what the other person thinks and feels, and maybe commit errors along the way, but there’s an openness, and that’s the essential ingredient, I think, in any relationship.”

Mortensen brought the screenplay to Krieps, who starred opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, as well as the highly regarded Corsage and Bergman Island.

“She has a very unique quality,” says Mortensen. “She has a particular kind of beauty and a way of being a presence on screen that I thought would lend itself to playing a woman from that time period. She has an inner force and transmits a lot even in silence in a way that I remember the first couple of things I saw Meryl Streep in years ago. Not everybody has it. It’s rare, and she has that and it’s almost like her feelings and her thoughts come through her skin.”

Vicky Krieps in The Dead Don't Hurt. Picture: Signature Entertainment/Marcel Zyskind

The same could be said of Mortensen, the most unshowy of actors, who has enjoyed a highly respected career spanning more than four decades. Now 65, as well as playing the central character of Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, he has worked on several occasions with David Cronenberg on projects including A History of Violence and A Dangerous Method. His films include action thrillers ( Crimson Tide), comedy-dramas ( Captain Fantastic) and crime thrillers ( Carlito’s Way). 2018’s Green Book got him his third Oscar nomination, following nods for Captain Fantastic and Eastern Promises.

Yet as a young man, he never considered the possibility of an acting career. “To be honest, it never occurred to me to try to be an actor,” he says. “I was, I think, socially kind of shy. But I loved going to the movies. It was my mother who took me for the first time and her whole life we went to movies together.

“In the first instance, she was always talking about story or asking me even as a little kid, ‘what do you think? Why do you think that happened?’ I think in another life she could have well been a screenwriter or a director or both.”

It was only five years ago that Mortensen himself first turned his hand to writing and directing, with the family drama Falling. With strong reviews for his second feature The Dead Don’t Hurt, was this something he decided to pursue only in recent years?

“I’ve always been interested in that overall process of taking a screenplay to the screen,” he says. “It’s a complicated journey. I’ve had a chance to watch really skilled directors, women and men from different places, different kinds of personalities who make different kinds of movies — but the best of them, they prepare really well. They take in the feelings and thoughts of the team they’re working with, they collaborate well, and I found that was the most efficient and calm and happy way to work.

“I tried it many years ago, in the early mid 90s. I had a screenplay that I partially financed that I wanted to direct but I didn’t find enough money to shoot at the time and I started working more as an actor. But I didn’t stop thinking about wanting to do it.

“I don’t know what I would have done back then but I know that for me, in the intervening years I got to work for really good people. I got to learn how to best tell a story.”