By Hoai-Tran Bui/Nov. 7, 2018 12:00 pm EST
In an interview with Collider ahead of the release of his awards contender Green Book, Mortensen took the time to give some kind advice to the still-uncast actor set to play the role he originated in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy:
Mortensen adds one more piece of homework for this future Aragorn: watch some Akira Kurosawa films.
“I would say, not only read the book, you know, very thoroughly, that giant book of Lord of the Rings, but you could read some of the Nordic sagas. You’ll get some clues there as to where Tolkien got his information. Like, Sigurd the Dragon Slayer, and the Volsunga saga. Read that.”
Of course, Mortensen didn’t have it easy from the beginning either. It’s a famous story by now that Mortensen wasn’t the first actor cast for the role of Aragorn, taking on the role from Stuart Townsend last-minute after the latter had already completed months of training in pre-production. Mortensen revealed that his process with the last-minute role change was similar to his advice to the future Aragorn:
“Lord of the Rings was a case where I replaced an actor and they were already filming – not only filming, but they’d been rehearsing for months and learning all these skills they had to have for those movies – language skills, invented the Elvish, and swordplay, and horse riding, all this stuff. And I was kind of freaked out because I said yeah and I’m on the plane, on this 13 hour plane flight, and I’m looking at the book, which I had never read. But as I started looking at it, I was like, ‘Well, there’s something.’ There’s always something that you can draw on. I had read or been read to as a kid, stories about Vikings and Nordic sagas and stuff, and there was something there that was familiar, but it was still – you know, fortunately when I started doing that shoot it was physical stuff, not dialogue. So it was like sword fighting, so I could get my feet wet with that before I actually had to start speaking.”
