Viggo Mortensen on Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando, and Captain Fantastic | Screen Tests | W Magazine

In this Screen Tests interview, actor Viggo Mortensen (Lord of the Rings, The Road, Eastern Promises) is a serious man. He prefers his birthdays pass unremarked — except one year, when he welcomed breakfast in bed and a bit of pampering. Here, the 'Captain Fantastic' actor discusses this, his most memorable birthday, and how he fell into acting after consulting the Yellow Pages. Transcript I call the tree, Viggo, that I planted. It's big, it's an oak. Theatre workshop was the first thing I auditioned for. It had no experience in theater or movies or anything. When I was , , pretty late for an actor, and I wondered what the trick was. How is it that they can make you feel things? Visceral, how is it that you walk out of the movie theater and you're shocked that you're walking down the street in Manhattan and you're not in the Sahara desert or something. I just wondered how it was done, so I thought, well I'm going to try it out for being an actor. So, I looked in the yellow pages in a Manhattan phone book, and I saw something that said Actor's Repertory Theater. I called up, and I said, what are you guys doing? What's the play? And they said, there is no play, but you can come back and you can go to class. That's how I started. I like storytelling and the movies, that's my main attraction to work in the movies. I'm looking for stories that I want to see in the movie theater. Even if I don't end up being in them. If I've re