Viggo’s Mobster Frightens Fans
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
Actor Viggo Mortensen has a reputation as digging deep to understand the character that he is playing in a movie but his latest role may have gone further than he expected. The ruggedly handsome star of “The Lord of the Rings” spent four hours every day having 43 tattoos painted on his fingers, hands and arms for his role in David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises”. In the film Mortensen plays a Russian mobster and his character’s tattoos reflect the same tattoos that real members of the Russian underworld sport. Each tattoo tells something about what the criminal has done, where they were born and what they believe in and serve as a coded language for other mobsters.
One day after Mortensen was finished filming for the day he went to a
“Eastern Promises” has earned early Oscar buzz for Mortensen, Cronenberg and co-star Naomi Watts after it won the peoples choice award at the Toronto Film Festival.
