Actor Viggo Mortensen, who famously portrayed Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings series, has revealed his unusual audition tactic that led other actors to believe he was a stoner. Speaking to James Corden, Mortensen early in his career he used to intentionally fall asleep in the waiting room for his auditions to help calm his nerves as he awaited his turn.
The unintended consequence of this was that other actors thought he was a stoner. They even gave him a pet name: “Sleepy Mortensen.”
“I used to get very nervous when I was in the waiting room, sitting there with other guys, knowing they’re your competition. My automatic way of dealing with it, I guess, was that I would just fall asleep,” he said. “If I was nervous, I’d sleep so I wouldn’t be stressed. I would just doze off. Snoring away. And then somebody would come and wake me up when it was my turn. I found out sometime later that I had gotten a reputation for being a stoner or something. So… they just thought, ‘That’s Sleepy Mortensen, he’s probably smoking too much weed.'”
