The sand has gotten chilly and damp and is no longer pleasant to walk in, so we scramble back up the rocks to the chain seafood restaurant next to the parking lot. Mortensen walks through the restaurant barefoot. I order a margarita. He orders a whiskey and a beer. The waiter sees a notepad on the table and his celebrity antennae pop up like Ray Walston’s extraterrestrial ones in My Favorite Martian.
“So just who is interviewing who?” the waiter asks us. This is a formality. He’s pretty sure that this is the guy from The Lord of the Rings. I start to reply, but Mortensen holds up his hand. “She has just set the world record for the longest distance windsurfed by a human being,” he says, tilting his head in my direction.
“No!” the waiter gasps.
“She windsurfed from Hawaii to the mainland,” he continues. “Sure, there was a boat that followed her, and she slept at night, but still. That’s what, how many miles?” He looks at me.
“Um, thirty-seven hundred?” I say. I have no idea.
“And not even a man has done that yet,” Mortensen tells the waiter. “Isn’t that cool?”
The waiter asks me to sign a menu.
A few whiskeys, a couple of beers, four margaritas, and two tequila shots later (the last, courtesy of the waitstaff to congratulate me on my incredible athletic achievement), we’re sitting in front of the pounding ocean in my rented LeSabre listening to Mortensen’s new CD, an activity that serves two purposes: I get to hear his latest songs (his car doesn’t have a CD player), and we both get to sober up before the drive home.
The music is dark, spooky stuff. Most of it comes from a jam session with Buckethead. We smoke American Spirit cigarettes as Mortensen, on the CD, recites over ominous guitar tracks a poem in Danish about a warrior who must leave home to avenge his country. We get into a long, boozy discussion about why he does so much stuff, why he is so bursting with creative energy that he can’t just be an actor.
“People who are creators create,” he says. “People say to me all the time, ‘Why don’t you just focus on one thing?’ And I say, ‘Why? Why just one thing? Why can’t I do more? Who makes up these rules?”
Dennis Hopper, a good friend, gets mad about the same thing. “Why does everybody have such a preconceived idea that an actor can only be an actor?,” Hopper asks me on the telephone a few days later. “I am just a farm boy from Kansas, but I always thought poetry and art and acting were … not exclusive to one another. Creating is creating. And when you’re an actor you have time to do other things besides sit and wait for your next job.” If Mortensen were locked in a box in a prison in total darkness, with no pens, no tools, no books, Hopper says, “he would make something amazing out of it.”
“There’s this quote from Rilke,” Hopper continues. “He says to the guy—this is Letters to a Young Poet; are you familiar with that book?—he says to the guy something like: You must ask yourself in the stillest moment of your night, If it were denied you to create, would you die, and if the answer is yes, then you have no choice. If your answer is no, then please go do something else.”
O.K., but the Lord of the Rings movies—Dennis? Did you like them? “I’m waiting for the third one” is all he will say.
The next day Mortensen and I meet at the Stephen Cohen Gallery, in West Hollywood, where his show “Miyelo”—consisting of seven-foot-long photographs of a Lakota tribal dance he took in South Dakota while filming Hidalgo—is up on the walls and sold out. He has mounted a half-dozen solo exhibitions in Cuba, Denmark, New York, and Los Angeles. His New York dealer, Robert Mann, says he had no idea who Mortensen was when he first met him four years ago.
“The Lord of the Rings wasn’t out, and I was clueless about that part of his life’ Mann says. “I saw the work and responded to it on its own merit. There’s a lot of volatility to it, a lot of emotion, a lot of subtext and sensitivity.” Mann says that, typically, celebrity art implies an underlying dilettantism. But Mortensen “is not a dabbler. I consider him a very lucky and talented person. Most artists are lucky to express themselves in one avenue.”
Mortensen’s new Disney movie, Hidalgo, is an epic Western, the story of Frank T. Hopkins, a cowboy and a dispatch rider for the United States Cavalry. In 1890, a sheikh—played by Omar Sharif—invited Hopkins and his horse Hidalgo to participate in a race (called the Ocean of Fire in the movie), which was run on a 3,000-mile course across the Arabian Desert. Typically it was restricted to Arabian horses, which for centuries had been bred to win. The movie manages to be Hollywood enough—with its uplifting underdog message and celebration of American grit and tenacity—but Mortensen is excited by its political subtext.
“I like the idea of being in an American movie, and the American character goes to a Third World country, in this case the Middle East, not to destroy, not to punish, but to challenge them in this contest, and in the end they learn something and he learns something. And then he goes home,” he says. “I think that’s kind of healthy.”
Rex Peterson, the horse trainer who worked with Mortensen on Hidalgo, calls him his favorite actor. “And I have worked in this business 25 years. I like Nicole Kidman, I like Tom Cruise. Some of them, though, I’ll never work with again.” On Hidalgo, Peterson says, “we had an actor I was going to spank like his mommy had never spanked him. But that’s another story.
“You know, every actor you work with, you ask them, ‘So, how do you ride?’ And they always say, ‘I ride excellently.’ Viggo says to me, ‘I ride O.K.’ He gets on the horse, and he rides better than me. That’s what I mean when I say the guy has no ego problems. He does not exist on the Hollywood plane—do you know what I mean?”
Mortensen arrives at the Stephen Cohen Gallery caked in mud, having just been riding T.J., who plays the title role in Hidalgo—Mortensen bought him after filming was over—and then washing him and giving him a conditioning treatment. “We don’t do that all the time,” Mortensen says. “He’s not a pretty-boy horse.”
Mortensen has arrived at the gallery alone, as he does almost everywhere. He has no group of hangers-on. No personal assistant. No factotum to address him by a snappy set of initials.
“Well, it’s not like anyone has ever forced me to have a personal assistant,” he says. “I have a partner, Pilar Perez, in Perceval Press. And I have a manager [Lynne Rawlings] who I trust. No matter how many people say, ‘Oh, this movie is such a great idea,’ she wants me to do things that feel right. Her motives are pure. They’re not based entirely on money.”
Come on, man. This is Hollywood.
“No, really. She’ll say it’s not worth it. It’s a silly approach in one sense because you always run out of money and then you’re in a position where you can’t borrow money anymore and you’ve got to do the best thing at the time for the money.”
He isn’t hungry to play any particular person or role. “Joseph Campbell said the privilege of a lifetime is being yourself. That’s his feeling. And I guess it’s mine too.”
After leaving the Cohen Gallery, we go next door to Grace, a glossy place with uplighting and women in little black dresses perched on banquettes. I ask him what he’ll be doing in five years. “I can’t even tell you what I’ll be doing in five months,” he says. “I don’t feel like I need to know.”
Are you religious?
“My answer would be what Walt Whitman said in Leaves of Grass. Um, something to the effect of ‘I hear and behold that God is in every object and yet I understand God not at all.'”
How long would he like to live?
“Forever.” Without hesitation.
Really? Wouldn’t you get bored?
“There’s no excuse to be bored,” Mortensen says. “Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there is no excuse for boredom, ever.”
A pause. “Of course. Henry says, ‘Yeah, well, Dad, if you were in my science class you’d know what it is to be bored.’ I guess that’s something a little different.”