Viggo Mortensen is an actor known for investing himself entirely in each of his roles and for being easy to get along with on set.
No extravagant requests, no diva whims.
On Lord of the Rings , he proved he was as tough as his character.
During the filming of The Two Towers , during the Battle of Helm’s Deep, he was stabbed in the face with a sword. Result, a broken tooth. His reaction ? He asked Peter Jackson if we couldn’t just glue his tooth back together with super glue and resume filming… (Peter Jackson refused and sent him to the dentist.)
In The Return of the King , for the sequence outside the gates of Mordor, the location chosen for filming was a former New Zealand Army training range. The team was unaware of this and learned at the last minute that the presence of mines on the ground was likely… Peter Jackson not being able to change location, he asked specialists to demarcate a “safe” area on which the actors could operate without danger. But when it came time to shoot the sequence, Viggo Mortensen began to improvise, deviating with his horse from the planned route. Peter Jackson described this experience as very trying. Viggo, for his part, wasn’t that worried…
In The Two Towers , when Aragorn thinks that Merry and Pippin have been killed by the orcs, he kicks a helmet and screams in anger.
While doing this, Viggo Mortensen broke two toes. But he continued to film the scene without coming out of character. And the cry of rage that we hear in the film is very real. It’s that of a man who is suffering!
Viggo also nearly drowned in the Two Towers sequence where he falls off a cliff after being chased by orcs. He was pulled underwater by his suit and thought he wouldn’t make it out. The stuntmen who were supervising the scene did not intervene because they thought that Viggo was pretending to struggle.
But apart from a “wow, I was hot!” afterwards, Viggo didn’t make much of this episode.