Ringer Spy Nazz attended the MANY press confrences during the ROTK media blitz last month. In this article he chats with actors Viggo Mortnesen and Liv Tyler.
Special thanks to Rip It Up Magazine in South Australia for this transcript.
Viggo Mortensen and Liv Tyler play the lovers Aragorn (the returning king of the title and the elf, Arwen:
They share their thoughts on working together and the love affair between their characters.
Liv: “He played with my ears a lot [laughs]! He had this habit of liking of slipping a stroke of my ears into as many shots as he could when we were together.”
Viggo: “I liked the ears. Very nice.”
Liv: “The most impressive thing, I think for everyone, about Viggo, was he got this phone call and had to get on the plane and arrive the next day.”
Viggo: “She’s changing the subject [laughs]!”
Liv: “He was so passionate and I learned a lot from Viggo about the material. He was always encouraging us to speak more Elvish together in our scenes. So in many ways, I credit Viggo for making our love story feel so rich and believable in many of the ways it is.”
Viggo: “I appreciated the fact that Liv seemed to understand these characters’ relationship was like those couples you see from time to time, maybe there’s one in your own family, that have been together for a long time, decades maybe – but not out of convenience. They’re just comfortable together and you can just see it in the way they move around each other, the way they almost absent-mindedly touch, finish each other’s sentences or show affection to one another. They understand that their union is more important than their individual existences. I think that’s really the story of Arwen and Aragorn.
That’s something they really value – and in a very limited time we had to get to that fairytale relationship without it seeming to be a cliché; and that there was something solid beneath that.”