'The Road's' Viggo Mortensen: Modern-Day Renaissance Man

Nov. 22, 2009 — -- Viggo Mortensen is a real-life Renaissance man whose abilities transcend his chiseled leading man looks.

Mortensen is a painter, a published poet, a talented photographer and an actor of vast range, with roles encompassing an Amish farmer ("Witness," 1985), a king of Middle-Earth ("The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, 2001-2003), an assassin of mobsters ("A History of Violence," 2005) and a tattooed undercover Russian officer whose naked violent bathhouse brawl is one of the most memorable scenes in modern film history ("Eastern Promises," 2007).

The latter role earned Mortensen an Academy Award nomination for best actor. Despite his successes, Mortensen believes that his most challenging performance has been portraying a starving father who struggles to protect his son in a post-apocalyptic America in his newest film, "The Road," based on Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

"This movie was the culmination of the roles I've played. I put lots of pieces together from other things and mostly my life and poured it into this role. I feel like I somehow got a lot of things off my chest. It was cathartic," said Mortensen in an interview with ABC News Now's "Popcorn With Peter Travers."

Unlike many Hollywood blockbusters that equate the apocalypse with spectacular visuals of exploding world monuments, "The Road," directed by John Hillcoat, focuses instead on the human story. A father is trying to teach his son to be a "good guy," but "goes off the rails out of fear and paranoia to protect his son," Mortensen said. The father, while foraging for food and shelter, has to shield his son from bands of cannibals and thieving gangs.

"Fear is used against us to make us do cruel things. Fear of what we don't understand and don't know. Fear defeats more people than anything else. How you deal with it makes you what you are," he added. In the end, it is the child who reminds his father of his teachings and becomes his "moral compass."

Mortensen believes they had to suffer to make a worthy adaptation of McCarthy's novel. "I knew it would be a tough journey," the actor said, "There are no shortcuts. You have to go there and take the audience there."

Making the movie was hard especially for then-11-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee, who played Mortensen's son. Most of the filming was in Pittsburgh in winter, and Kodi, who hails from Southern Australia, had never seen snow. In a particularly intense scene, Kodi was so cold, he "started to shake," Mortensen recalled. "I knew he was falling apart emotionally. I could feel it. He's a mess. He's in pain. I was looking at him. I'm asking him do you want to stop? He stayed in character and from then on everything was different ... my admiration and my loyalty to him grew."