Viggo Mortensen

Viggo Mortensen doesn't need prompting to talk about the modern resonance of "Good," the film adaptation of C.P. Taylor's play about an ordinary man in 1930s Germany being slowly co-opted by the Nazis. "I made the leap immediately from what would I have done if I were Prof. John Halder, to what am I doing now, in my time?" he says by phone from Denmark. "When I saw it in 1982, [Margaret] Thatcher was prime minister and [Ronald] Reagan was president.

AS Viggo Mortensen and director David Cronenberg plotted the unforgettable bathhouse knife fight in their new crime thriller, "Eastern Promises," Cronenberg told the actor he wanted realism and "body-ness." The director wanted to challenge his audience to really experience the intimacy of such violence. "Well, it's obvious," Mortensen told him, "I have to play this naked." Boy does he.

Ashton Holmes left the East Coast for Los Angeles about two years ago -- and within months had landed a role in "A History of Violence," which opened Friday. Holmes, 23, plays Jack Stall, the teenage son of a small-town couple (Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello) whose life changes when his father becomes a national hero by fighting off a pair of drifters who show up in his diner, looking for trouble.

On a January night at Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica, actor-artist-writer Viggo Mortensen reads the prose poem he wrote for an anthology about Iraq, "Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation." It is one of the quieter pieces in the passionate volume and the author reads so softly that the entire audience leans in to hear him. But Mortensen, who played the heroic Aragorn in the "Lord of the Rings" films, is here not as a writer but in his capacity as publisher of Perceval Press.