Happy Birthday Viggo Mortensen

Of course Viggo Mortensen (51 today) is best known for playing Aragon in the LOTR films, but my favorites are his roles in David Cronenberg films, both A History of Violence and Eastern Promises.  He finally earned an Oscar nomination for Eastern Promises, where he plays a Russian Mobster in London.  He did a lot of preparation for the role, going to Moscow to talk to underworld figures there, and learn about the significance of the prison tattoos they wear.

Mortensen became acutely aware of the effect his tattoos had while on location, noting he "had scared the shit unwittingly" out of some Russian immigrants in London restaurants. "I had to remove the visible ones when I went out anywhere, they really did scare some people."

 Eastern Promises is probably my favorite, and no it's not just the nude fight scene.  "I am just a driver," Viggo's character says.  "I go left, I go right, I go straight ahead."  Viggo just so nailed this Russian mobster in all his scariness and complexity.  Here's a little taste in the Youtube clip below.  If you've never seen Eastern Promises, you have to go rent it as it's some of his best work ever.  Viggo's latest film, The Road, has been pushed to a Thanksgiving release date.

Hurray! A sequel to Eastern Promises is in the works

This is awesome news. MTV interviewed David Cronenberg, the director of Eastern Promises, and he says he's working on putting together a sequel to Eastern Promises, for which Viggo Mortensen earned an Oscar nomination playing Russian gangster Nikolai.

The big twist at the end of 2007’s “Eastern Promises”—that Viggo Mortensen’s character, a Russian gangster named Nikolai, is really working for a British intelligence service—raised as many questions as it answered.

Cronenberg has never had any interest in revisiting his work -- and little of it ever has the loose ends that Eastern Promises did. "It's the first time I've ever been in a situation where I actually want to do a sequel to something. I've never had the desire to do that before. But in this case, I thought we had unfinished business with those characters. I didn't feel that we had finished with Nikolai and we had done a lot of research that was more than we could stuff into that one movie."

I hope Naomi Watts is back, too, but whatever the script is, I'm sure it will be great. You certainly left that movie wanting to know even more about Viggo's character and what made him the man he was. Viggo's Russian prison style tattoos were a long lasting type, and scared Russian immigrants who saw him with them off set!

Happy Birthday Viggo!

Today is Viggo Mortensen's 50th birthday. I didn't see him in Appaloosa, and now we'll have to wait for The Road.

When it comes to the 2008 Oscars, this could be the end of “The Road.” The Viggo Mortensen-starring dark thriller, which earlier this week had been pushed from November to December, now looks likely to open in 2009. A new release date has not been set, but the movie, a Dimension title from The Weinstein Company, probably will bow in either February or March.

The Weinstein Company declined to comment on any postponement. But director John Hillcoat’s film about a man (Mortensen) and his son wandering a post-apocalyptic U.S. is not expected to be ready in time for a 2008 release, and those involved with the film have decided that it will benefit from more post-production time and a less crowded release calendar.

Nuts.

Here's a blast from the past pic of Viggo from 1980. He used to just be a pretty face!

and here he is in Eastern Promises. Like a fine wine, he has aged pretty damn well.