Viggo Mortensen

Viggo Mortensen spoke with HFPA journalists in 2002 on the set of Hidalgo. He was working on the adventure film about the legend of Frank Hopkins, who rode his mustang Hidalgo in the “Ocean of Fire” 3,000-mile endurance race of 1891 against Bedouins riding pure-bred Arabian horses in the Najid desert of Saudi Arabia.

Once Golden Globe-nominated Viggo Mortensen learned that it was going to be Mahershala Ali playing Don Shirley in Green Book, he was happy. He had hesitated in accepting the role of Tony Lip, the film’s Italian-American bouncer from the Bronx.

Director Peter Farrelly, one half of the sibling duo more noted for broad quirky comedies like Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary, takes a more traditional turn with Green Book, a road movie biopic set in 1962. The movie recounts the true story of Dr.

The movie that the New Orleans Film Festival picked for their opening night could not have been better: director Peter Farrelly's Green Book is based on the true story of African American concert pianist Don Shirley, who decides to tour the Deep South. A great idea except it is 1962 and he needs protection, so the record company hires Italian-American New Yorker Tony “Lip” Vallelonga to drive him around and run interference in dicey situations.

Green Book, a sleeper hit among the big hits of Toronto International Film Festival, won the event’s People’s Choice Award. In previous years, TIFF’s audience prize has launched the trajectory of several films, among them Slumdog Millionaire, 12 Years a Slave, The King’s Speech, American Beauty and Chariots of Fire.

A rare gem who does not go with the flow, this Danish-American actor simply insists on being himself whether Hollywood likes it or not. Making his film debut in Peter Weir’s 1985 crime thriller Witness as Moses Hochleitner, Mortensen then did a variety of roles that also gained him critical acclaim – as small-town diner owner Tom Stall in David Cronenberg’s crime thriller A History of Violence (2005), deputy Everett Hitch in the western Appaloosa (2008), Nikolai Luzhin in the gangster film Eastern Promises (2007), founder of the discipline of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud in the historical film A Dangerous Method (2011) and Daru in the French drama film Far from Men (2014).

Talking to us at the Cannes Film Festival, Viggo Mortensen says he smiled when he read the title of Captain Fantastic’s script. “I smiled and said, it can’t really be called that, it can’t really be serious.

Brexit – the referendum on whether Great Britain should leave or remain in the European Union - hit the world like a tsunami. While world leaders try to figure out ways to deal with the aftermath, the HFPA collected reactions and opinions of the vote from American and European celebrities.