Why Viggo Mortensen Is Off the Grid MULTIPLE BLOCKBUSTERS, AN OSCAR NOMINATION, PIERCING BLUE EYES–WHO'S THAT GUY AGAIN?
BY LISA DEPAULO AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARC HOMMAY 25, 2016
This summer, the quintessentially un-Hollywood Viggo Mortensen stars in a film about a father of six who rejects the world to raise his kids completely off the grid. How much does this character resemble the actor himself? Let's start with his flip phone.
Viggo Mortensen has come bearing pancake mix. We are curbside at the tiny airport in Syracuse, New York, on a truly dreary day (even by Syracuse standards), and within seconds of hopping into his rented Ford Fusion, I learn two things about him: He's the kind of guy who picks you up at the airport, and he's the kind of guy who brings presents. Pancake mix is a delicacy in upstate New York. "Do you like maple syrup?" Because he brought me some of that, too. He's prepared a gift bag.
"You can smoke in the car," Mortensen says, gesturing with his own smoldering American Spirit. "There's an ashtray." It's a cardboard cup from the airport Best Western, where he got his coffee this morning, that he has filled with an inch of water. For us.
Is he always this chivalrous?
He smiles. "I try."
Clooney, I tell him, probably never picks anyone up at airports.
He laughs. "He's probably a lot busier than I am."
Marc Hom
We're here to talk about Mortensen's new movie, a subversive and surprising family drama called Captain Fantastic, and we're here here, in upstate New York, because Mortensen has taken some time off from his life in Madrid to care for his dying father. To see him to the end, same as he did for his mother, Grace, who passed away a year ago. Grace was a saint. His father, also named Viggo Peter Mortensen, not so much. But you do what you have to do. The old man is in Watertown, an hour and a half from the Syracuse airport, where Mortensen went to high school and where we are headed now.
And so we drive. Or, rather, he drives. For the next eight hours, for about 250 miles, up to and around Watertown, through the Adirondacks and not quite to Canada—though he does ask if I brought my passport—with periodic stops at diners and waterfalls, lakes and trout ponds, his mother's grave and finally his father's farmhouse. Viggo loves to drive. Sometimes he drives cross- country, just for the hell of it. And yet he has rented a Ford Fusion. "They always do this thing where they try to upgrade me to some fancy fucking car." But he doesn't want a fancy fucking car. At times, he spontaneously pulls over to the side of the road for a good five or ten minutes to finish a train of thought—about life or death or demons or fears or his favorite soccer team in Argentina, San Lorenzo. About the time in the wilds of New Zealand when he skinned, cooked, and ate his own roadkill. ("It was there.") About how much he loves the militant Chomskyite he plays in Captain Fantastic, a father of six who decides to raise his kids in the isolated wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. We could've gone straight to Watertown and stayed there, and we could've gotten there a hell of a lot faster, but Mortensen, his two hands resting gently on the bottom of the steering wheel, doesn't like to drive too fast. He doesn't want to miss a thing.
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Poster Comment:
I wish I was off the grid.