Call of the wild: Viggo Mortensen goes off grid in ‘Captain Fantastic’

“Do you think that wall over there is real rock or artificial?” asks Viggo Mortensen with a gesture toward a stone – almost certainly fake stone – wall in a central Dublin hotel.

I've just asked about the actor's recent run of rather tactile roles – rafting through Argentina's Paraná Delta in Everybody Has a Plan, hallucinating in a desert in Jauja, fleeing across the Atlas mountains in Far From Men – and he seems keen to play down the idea that he's seeking out the planet's most physically challenging character studies.

“I don’t consciously look for scripts that pitch characters against the environment,” he insists. “I look at the story first and foremost. But I do enjoy them. I was happy to play Freud and he did all his fighting with words. I don’t have to be out in the wilderness. I like being in a forest, but it isn’t crucial.”

Even assuming that his survivalist streak is determined at a subconscious level – he did make a tremendous Sigmund Freud in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method – his turn in the very outdoorsy Captain Fantastic looks awfully like Extreme Method Acting.

Mortensen dislikes the term "method" but he sure knows how to throw himself into a role: he studied Russian history and literature ahead of his Oscar-nominated turn in Eastern Promises (2008), he slept in sub-zero temperatures and wore wet shoes during the shoot of The Road (2009), and he drove around Germany and Poland visiting concentration camps to play a Nazi in Good (2008).

The survivalist adventure Captain Fantastic concerns Ben Cash (Mortensen), a fiercely anti- capitalist former academic who has left the rat-race to raise his six children in an isolated yurt somewhere in America's Pacific Northwest. The kids are taught to hunt, fish, fight, run and climb. By day, they read Middlemarch, The Brothers Karamazov and quantum physics; by night, they sing songs and play guitar.

By the time writer-director Matt Ross sent Mortensen a box of literature by naturalist Tom Brown and political theorist Noam Chomsky – the Cash family celebrate Noam Chomsky Day instead of Christmas – the actor had already read them all and learned how to play the bagpipes.

Utopian ideals

“The films you remember are the ones that have something to say about our society,” says Mortensen. “I think this is going to be one of the films that people remember. It’s a film about finding balance between utopian ideals and conservative forces and ideas. When I started reading the script I was hooked but I imagined it was this niche, political thing. It turned out to be not that simplistic. The father is against rigidity and authoritarianism but he unwittingly falls into the trap of becoming both. And he has to wrestle with that.”

The Danish-American speaks softly in long, thoughtful answers. He's understandably proud and positive about his new project, a film that played in Cannes earlier this year, yet he always sounds as if he's contemplating its nature aloud rather than simply shilling. He's delighted that Captain Fantastic is both sad and funny, "when it could have been turned into a broad comedy". He's also thrilled that the film has tested well with teenage girls who have responded positively to the way Cash girls "don't function in response to males or society".

“I’m sorry,” he smiles, more than once. “We were supposed to be talking about something else. What was it?”

Mortensen seems genuinely keener to extrapolate from the film than to give the hard-sell. “I think it speaks to the polarisation of our society without being ideologically pointed. We live at a moment when people have the means to communicate with other people, to learn about other people, yet they use the technology to reinforce what they know. It makes for paranoia: paranoia about race, religion, nationality, regionalism.”

International

Conversely, Mortensen – who currently divides his time between Santa Monica, where his publishing house, Perceval Press, is based, and Madrid, where he lives with Ariadna Gil, star of Pan's Labyrinth – is a very international animal. Though he was born in New York, young Viggo grew up in Argentina, between Buenos Aires, and Chaco, where his Danish father worked as a farmer. Aged 11, he returned to New York following his parents' divorce. After university he went travelling around England, Spain and Denmark, before returning to the US to pursue a career in acting.

A lifelong border-hopper, he is dismayed but not surprised by the wall-building mentality of Brexiteers and Donald Trump.

“The coverage of Trump and Brexit suggests that people are stunned,” says Mortensen. “But Trump is the logical conclusion of something that has been happening for a long time. Over the past 30 years, politicians in the United States have been using race and class and a fear of outsiders. They just haven’t been as blunt or as good at it as he is. He’s a smart opportunist. There’s a lot of negative things I could say about him but being an opportunist is not one of them.

“The best artists and actors are opportunists. I’m old enough to remember when the UK went into the common market so Brexit is not too surprising to me, either. The British have always wanted special privileges. They want to preserve their uniqueness. That’s understandable. But isolation can only make your culture poorer not richer.”

Mortensen may be a polymath who paints, writes poetry, proofreads the manuscripts at his publishing house, crafts custom knives and makes records with Buckethead, but he was not an overnight success: blink and you might miss him in Peter Weir's Witness (1985) and a 1987 episode of Miami Vice (in which he appears then gets blown up).

Big league

His work on The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) wound up on the cutting room floor. He was already in his late 20s when a series of supporting roles – Carlito's Way (1993), Crimson Tide (1995) – brought him to the cusp of stardom. But his tastes and interests were often out of step with the Hollywood big league – see The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995), Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady (1996), Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake (1998) – until he was added, as a last-minute replacement for Stuart Townsend, to the Lord of the Rings cast. (Mortensen only said "yes" to appease his then 10-year-old son Henry, a Tolkien fan).

David Cronenberg, who has directed Mortensen in A History of Violence, Eastern Promises and A Dangerous Method, has said that being a late bloomer has made Mortensen a more gracious, thoughtful actor.

“Maybe,” Mortensen says: “I would imagine that when you’re successful early on, you don’t have the appreciation of how great it is to have a movie in, say, five cinemas. You haven’t learned your craft. I was always curious about how movies were made, how you could be transported to the Russian steppe, and work allowed me to learn.

"I got to learn how different actors audition or approach a role. How to work with directors who don't direct. I think that public attention wouldn't have allowed me to stay with it for very long. I was shocked when Lord of the Rings brought all that attention. But I knew by then that it wouldn't last at that level forever. I'd been around long enough."