Lone star; You starred in the Lord Of The Rings movies, which made

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Apr 11, 2004 | by Peter Ross

SOME Hollywood stars squander money on hookers; Viggo Mortensen spends his on TJ. To clarify: TJ is the horse who plays the title role in Hidalgo, Mortensen's first movie post-Lord Of The Rings, his chance to prove that he can cut it as the star of a film that doesn't require him to kick orc butt. He and TJ got along real well during the four-month shoot, much of which took place in Morocco's Sahara Desert; so well, in fact, that he bought the horse when the film wrapped because he wanted to "continue the relationship". TJ now lives near Los Angeles, where he enjoys regular shampoos and hangs out with the horse Mortensen rode in the Rings trilogy.

Adopting horses is typical of the man who is, arguably, the hottest American actor of the moment. You might even call the gesture Mortensian. It has all the right ingredients - loyalty, manly sensitivity, a pinch of mysticism. When Russell Crowe yaks about his herd of cattle, you accept it as part of his tough guy shtick; when Mortensen buys a horse, you just know it's because, somehow, the animal spoke to him, that he had to have it. Mortensen puts the "must" into Mustang - untamed compulsions drive him.

"Viggo is just the coolest guy," says Billy Boyd, the Scottish actor who played the hobbit Pippin in Lord Of The Rings. "It's hard to say too much about how cool he is. If you spend enough time with people they will do something to piss you off, or that shows them to be just a normal human being, but I think Viggo does like to push himself to be just the best person he can, and that comes across. If you believe in reincarnation, he does seem to be quite far along his line. He does seem to have learned a lot of lessons, and seems quite old and wise. But he's not a serious fuddy-duddy. He'll go surfing with us, and he likes to go out at night and have some drinks."

Right now, the old, wise, surfing, drinking, reincarnated 45-year- old superdude is lying on the couch in London's Dorchester Hotel. It is late on Friday afternoon, and while Mortensen talks, at least one small corner of his brain is choking to finish the interview and go for a beer. He had been out the night before with Sean Bean, but the sight of both Aragorn and Boromir from Lord Of The Rings sitting in the pub (Mortensen, a committed polyglot, actually uses the word "pub") was too much for the capital's autograph-hounds and they advanced en masse. Eventually Mortensen gave up and went back to his room. "It can be a drag sometimes," he says, then, worried that he sounds like a whingeing movie star, qualifies it, "but mostly it's not a drag. I don't mean to be elitist or weird."

He is not a man who can walk into a room unnoticed. His father, also called Viggo, is Danish, and Mortensen has inherited his northern European features - the bowed brow and arrowhead cheekbones. His blond hair is neatly parted and he is clean-shaven; there is a jagged scar on his upper lip, a streak of lightning against his tan, the relic of a fight during his teenage years.

A weird mix of cowboy and playboy, Mortensen gives the impression of Indiana Jones going to a fancy dress party as Bryan Ferry. He hates shoes; a pair of scuffed hiking boots are discarded on the floor beside the couch, but otherwise his clothes are suave - light suit, white shirt, pale silk tie. On his right wrist, peeping from beneath a crisp white cuff, there is a tattoo - the letter H for his teenage son, Henry. On his left lapel he wears a UN badge and a black ribbon out of respect for those killed by the Madrid bombings.

He had been in Madrid less than 48 hours before the attacks. On the day they happened he flew to Sweden, and went straight from the airport to a TV studio for interviews, unaware of what was going on in Spain. "Then I finally got back that evening to the hotel, I turned on the TV and I was shocked. I instantly felt embarrassed and silly. Here I had been making jokes and talking about Hidalgo, and this had happened. It seemed so insignificant and stupid to be talking about a movie. I thought about it for a bit, and it bothered me, but after a while I started to think, well, the reason why I was interested in the story in the first place was valid, and maybe even more valid now."

Hidalgo, set in the 1890s, is the story of Frank T Hopkins, a celebrated long-distance horseman fallen on hard times, who accepts the challenge to enter the Ocean of Fire, a 3000-mile survival race across the Arabian Desert, the first non-Arab to ever enter the competition. Although Disney is pitching Hidalgo as being based on a true story, some sources have cast doubt on its authenticity, even suggesting it is anti-Muslim. This makes Mortensen furious, and he spends a good chunk of our interview ranting about it.

The underlying message of Hidalgo, he says, is that life would be better if we made the effort to experience and tolerate other cultures. It's an anti-bigotry, anti-colonialism film disguised as an old-fashioned adventure movie, a Trojan horse bearing good vibes, and thus perfect for our paranoid, mistrustful, hate-filled times. While reflecting on this in Sweden, he says: "I made the transition to thinking that it wasn't completely ridiculous, and I wasn't a complete ass to be talking about a movie when this is going on."