[interview extract]
Charlie Rose: You're obviously making a political statement with your T-shirt.
Viggo Mortensen: I wouldn't normally, but it's sort of a reaction to... I've heard a lot of people say to me and I've read in a lot of places about the first movie, and increasingly about the second one... I've seen where people try to relate it to current situation--specifically the United States and their role in the world right now. And I -- if you're going to compare them, then you should get it right--I don't like hearing... I mean I play the character who's defending Helms Deep and I don't think that The Two Towers or Tolkien's writing or Peter's work or our work has anything to do with the United States' foreign ventures at this time. And it upsets me to hear that in a way. And it upsets me even more that questioning what's going on right now, what the United States is doing, is considered treasonous really: "How dare you say that? How un-American of you." And really, this country is founded on the principle that if the government isn't serving the people you at least have the right to say, "Wait a minute. What's going on?" And there're no questions really being asked, at large, about what we're doing. Whereas in The Two Towers you have different races, nations, cultures coming together and examining their conscience and unifying against a very real and terrifying enemy. What the United States has been doing for the past year is bombing innocent civilians without having come anywhere close to catching Osama bin Laden or any presumed enemy, and, as a distraction, we're now--apparently it's a given--we're hell bent on increasing the bombing that's been going on for the past eleven years in Iraq. And I don't think that the civilians on the ground in those countries look at us in the way that maybe Europeans did at the end of World War II, waving flags in the streets, I think that they see the US government as Saruman.
full interview:
http://www.artistsnetwork.org/news7/news318.html
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