Solly McLeod has been watching Viggo Mortensen in the movies since he was a kid. When he was a young boy growing up on Orkney his grandad, he remembers, would show him the Lord of the Rings films in which Mortensen played Aragorn.
“These were the films that got me into acting,” McLeod says as he sits in a Glasgow hotel alongside the man he watched in those movies all those years ago.
“I was an attention-seeking kid,” McLeod continues, “so I was like, ‘they give me money to do this? OK.’”
So when as an adult he got a call from Mortensen to appear in a film that the American actor wanted to direct, it was, McLeod admits, a little surreal.
“Having a call from one of the people who got me into it was an honour,” McLeod admits. But, he adds, it was also terrifying.
“I was pacing up and down my room waiting for the phone to ring and when it did I lunged for it, then doubled down. ‘I should let it ring.’”
Beside him, Viggo Mortensen is smiling while he listens to McLeod’s story.
How many times did you let the phone ring?
“Five. And then when I picked up I was like, “Yeah. Hi, who’s this? Oh yeah, hey Viggo. Yeah, I’m alright. Bit busy, but what’s going on? I think I can chat.”
Both men laugh at the vision of McLeod trying to play it cool.
March in Glasgow. It’s the afternoon after the night before. The pair of them have been on media duties all day in support of their new film The Dead Don’t Hurt, directed and starring Mortensen and McLeod, alongside Vicky Krieps, who, they both admit, is the heart of the movie.
The said night before, Mortensen’s western had received its UK premiere in front of a packed house at the Glasgow Film Festival. Afterwards Mortensen, McLeod and the Scottish actor’s family had dinner, helped along with some liquid refreshment provided by the festival.
“They gave me a very nice bottle of whisky which we consumed with the family,” Mortensen recalls.
“It was gone in five minutes,” McLeod adds.
“Quite good,” Mortensen continues approvingly. “It was a lowland whisky.”
McLeod doesn’t seem offended. “It did the job.”
It’s a pleasure to spend time in their company because they seem to enjoy each other’s. They joke and talk about acting and storytelling and America and the difficulties of making a movie at this point in the 21st century.
The difference between them, I guess, is that McLeod is an actor - a very good one with a promising future ahead of him - and Mortensen is a star. We’ve seen his face projected 10ft by 30ft on our cinema screens for some 40 years now. He turned up in the background of the Harrison Ford thriller Witness in 1985, Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady and G.I. Jane opposite Demi Moore before cementing his status (and inspiring the young McLeod) in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He has worked with David Cronenberg and been nominated for Best Actor three times at the Oscars.
Mortensen speaks in a slow, deliberate drawl, soothing and hypnotic. You’d hardly know he was born in New York (though he was mostly raised in Denmark and Argentina). It’s a voice perfect for westerns. He’s done a couple (Appaloosa, Hidalgo), but The Dead Don’t Hurt - shot on location in Mexico and Canada - is a handsome piece of work that is both respectful of the genre while slightly subverting it at the same time.
It’s the story of Holger Olsen (Mortensen) who is forging a life on the American frontier with his partner Vivienne Le Coudy, played by Krieps. But when he goes off to fight in the American Civil War, she draws the attention of the gun-happy Weston Jeffries (McLeod), the son of the local landlord. It’s a film of big landscapes and primal emotions.
“I tried to be respectful of the best aspect of that classical type of western in terms of the cinematography,” Mortensen points out. “It doesn’t draw attention to itself other than these beautiful landscapes that they ‘re in. And the language that people are speaking is faithful to the time period.”
Indeed, but putting a woman front and centre is transformative.
“If there’s anything subversive or different from the best of the classic westerns it’s that there is a flesh-and-blood woman at the centre of the story,” Mortensen concedes. “And furthermore we stay with her when her male companion goes off to war.
“It’s a love story between them, but the onus is on her halfway through the movie. You’re with her a long time when he’s not around and that’s unusual,” he admits.
“And who better to do it than Vicky,” McLeod adds. True enough. Krieps gives an electric performance. McLeod’s isn’t bad either as the local bad boy Weston Jeffries. Jeffries, Mortensen explains, is a “sociopathic combination of really being charming and also being lethal and merciless.
“I needed a young actor who’s a bit of a psycho,” he says, looking over to McLeod. “They’ve banned him from Orkney,” he jokes.
Is it different, I ask McLeod, being directed by another actor?
“If there is a difference it’s only beneficial. Sometimes it’s easy to give too much direction. You have to be adaptable as an actor working with different directors.
He turns and talks to Mortensen directly. “For me anyway the way you were able to put yourself in a scene I might be doing was definitely helpful.”
Mortensen himself suggests sometimes less is more when it comes to talking to actors.
“I think if it’s working don’t say much. I got that from Cronenberg. I remember working on the last one I did with him and I remember one of the performers say to me, ‘Do you think he is happy with what we are doing? He’s not saying anything to us.’ I said, ‘That’s good.’”
McLeod smiles and admits, “We do need a little validation.”
Mortensen nodds. “Yeah, you go to the worst place. ‘Oh they’re not speaking to me. They’re so appalled by what I’m doing that there’s no fixing it.’
“Some directors are easier than others. Some like to rehearse, some don’t. Some like to talk to you. Some talk too much. Some don’t say maybe as much as you’re used to and you just have to be self-sufficient and have the tools to adapt to any situation.
“And as a director you have to be flexible. You can’t help each actor in the same way.”
The Dead Don’t Hurt is also slightly different from some other westerns in the way it reminds us that America in its nascent years (and ever since for that matter) is a polyglot place, a mixing pot of many cultures. Krieps plays a French Canadian, Mortensen a Danish immigrant.
There are American politicians today who don’t seem to recognise the country’s multiculturalism.
“It is nonsense, complete nonsense,” Mortensen says, his voice rising. “It was a melting pot and to have people who are American but who maybe don’t speak English, or don’t speak it very well, or speak it with an accent of another language, was not any less common then than it is now. Or any less American.”
This is not the message that Donald Trump is advocating. Mortensen, who endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016, has never shied from criticising the Republican presidential candidate. But here we are and, despite everything, Trump could get in again. Does the actor fear for the future of America?
“Oh yeah. The norms - the social norms, the political norms - and the actual law of the country, the compact that the society has had throughout the history of the United States, it’s stretched to almost the limit right now, really.”
It’s been stretched before, he admits. His film is set against the backdrop of the American Civil War after all. And he can see similarities between Trump and Alfred Jeffries - the father of McLeod’s character - in his film.
“That wasn’t the intention, but you can compare it. Where they are similar is their impunity. They are used to doing exactly what they want and if the law doesn’t suit them they change the law or subvert it.”
Even a decade ago infidelity or financial irregularities would end your political career, he suggests.
“Trump has broken all those rules. And he’s encouraged others.”
He sees Putin in Russia as cut from similar cloth. “It’s a horrible situation. What are you going to do? Well, a bully has to be stopped, you can’t just let it go.”
Does he fear Trump will win?
“He could. I don’t feel he will, but I think that’s because I’m an optimist. We’ll see. I didn’t think he would win in 2020 and he didn't. He lost by seven million votes. But there is an archaic system, the electoral college.”
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He pivots back to Putin. “It’s not just the suffering in Ukraine,” he says, “It's families in Russia; mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, who have lost loved ones just because of one man’s brutal ambition; a murderous, grotesquely corrupt person.
“And he will keep going. It’s like Trump. If you don’t stop them legally or otherwise why would they stop? And if they see weakness they’ll just exploit it.”
It’s a story for a western you might say.
“It is a western story,” he agrees. “I’m optimistic that eventually the ship will right itself. But it’s going to take some work.”
Time to go. One last question. Solly, what did you take away from this experience?
“I thought I came away a better actor, knowing more about film and how to be on a set. And we made something really special.”
Never meet your heroes? Solly McLeod might tell you otherwise.
The Dead Don’t Hurt is in selected cinemas now
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