Viggo Mortensen Offers Advice To Whoever Plays Aragorn in Amazon's LORD OF THE RINGS Series
We’ve got a long way to go before we see any kind of progress on Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series. But, I’m excited about to see what it will end up being.
Star Trek 4 writers JD Payne and Patrick McKay are currently writing the series. What we know about the series at this point is that it will explore new storylines preceding J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. This is what Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke had to say about the project:
"We are really excited to move right into the next phase of the development process, which is building the world. I think you can know that we’re not remaking the movies, but we’re also not starting from scratch. So, it’ll be characters you love.
"It’s not a remaking of the movies, and it’s not a whole new thing. It’s something in between. It’s not, ‘Oh, it’s Lord of the Rings but you don’t recognize anything in it,’ but it’s not totally familiar to you either. So it’s original."
It was also rumored that the series could focus on a young version of Aragorn, and that’s where Viggo Mortensen come in. It’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. Mortensen was amazing as Aragorn and Peter Jackson’s version of Tolkien’s story brought the character to life in such an amazing way that will be hard to top. But, Amazon is going to try.
We have know idea who might end up in the role of young Aragon, but Mortensen offers some words of advice to whoever is cast in the role.
During an interview with Collider, the actor said:
“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.”
Mortensen then added one more piece of advice for the future Aragorn, and that is to watch some Akira Kurosawa films.
That’s great advice! Hopefully Amazon doesn’t cast an actor that’s too lazy to jump in and do all of this as a way to research the hell out of the characters.
Mortensen goes to to share how he prepared for the role when he was cast at the last minute to replace Stuart Townsend, who was the original actor cast in the role of 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.”
Now, who would you like to see take on the role of Aragorn in the upcoming Lord of the Rings series?