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Actor Viggo Mortensen was praised for his performance as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, but as it turns out, his acting was even more impressive than we might have known. That’s because Mortensen has now revealed he suffers from vertigo, and he had an episode during the filming of a key scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
Speaking to Lord of the Rings superfan Stephen Colbert, who also experiences vertigo, Mortensen said he rarely gets hit with a bout of vertigo but it happened during the filming of a scene for the Battle of Helm’s Deep in Two Towers. This took place while he was filming a scene involving climbing a structure and hacking at Orcs. In between takes, high up on the wall, Mortensen began experiencing vertigo; he became frozen and could not get down from the trestle.
“The first time it hit me badly [as an adult] was during The Lord of the Rings. I was doing a scene, the Battle of Helm’s Deep, all these scenes were at night and it was rainy. And there was a stairway that was about a foot wide, no railing, going up the side of a wall. There’s a scene where I’m fighting my way up, trying to get up to the top. And there’s all these Orcs coming down with their weapons. And I’m fighting them all the way up. One throws a spear sideways, and I leap over and swing my legs over the precipice, and keep going.”
“And I did a couple or three takes. And then said, ‘We want to do one more take, but let’s just take a break.’ So everybody was rushing down. I turned as I was going to go down the stairs. And suddenly got [vertigo]. Really badly. I froze. And people were waiting. All these Orc actors were trying to get past me. I just got against the wall. I was just looking up at the night sky. I couldn’t look down.”
Mortensen said he felt very tense in this moment, and all he was able to do was slowly curl around and act like a spider, clinging to the wall. After the other actors had descended the structure around him, people on the ground said, “Viggo, are you all right?”
All Mortensen could do was stand there and try to play it off, he said. “It was horrible, and I was really thinking … I don’t even want to go down. Much less do I want to fight on these stairs. Somehow I got through it, but it was horrible,” he said.
Mortensen is currently out on a press tour promoting his movie, Falling, which marks his directorial debut. He also stars in the movie, and he wrote the script and the music.
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