You’re making a movie. You need a sword. You happen to have starred in one of the most famous fantasy films of all time which itself has some famous swords in it. Plus, wouldn’t you know it? You’ve got one lying around. What are you doing to do? Not use your own sword?

That’s basically what happened to Viggo Mortensen on his latest film, The Dead Don’t Hurt. The Western, which is now in select theaters, features fantasy sequences, one of which required a sword. So, the star of the Lord of the Rings trilogy went and grabbed Andúril, Aragorn’s sword from the series, which he just so happened to own. But it wasn’t quite that simple.

“We had everything for this sequence with a knight,” the actor/director told GQ Magazine. “We had found this great, spirited horse, the right kind of saddle, and we made a medieval kind of blanket, and we had the costume for the knight. Everything was right, and then I said, well, we should have a sword. And I did look and there were some good ones and I thought, well, it might be kind of good to use this one that I had because it’s really good. But I knew I would have to ask permission because I’m sure somebody would notice it, even if you only see it for a few seconds, it’s not really essential to the scene and certainly not to the movie, it’s just something in passing that you either see or you don’t.”

So if you want to ask permission to use a prop from the Lord of the Rings, who do you call? The director of Lord of the Rings, of course.

“So I did ask Peter Jackson if he’d be all right with it, and he said, “Well, is it very important in the story?” I said, no, it’s not, actually. You hardly notice it, but somebody will, probably. He said it was okay with him but that I should ask the movie company,” Mortensen said. “So I contacted them and they were fine with it. They realized it wasn’t essential, it wasn’t going to draw a lot of attention to itself. And they were very nice about it, and they gave us permission. That’s why we did it, just because it seemed right. It was kind of a last-minute accident.”

An accident that, now we’re guessing, made you aware that Viggo Mortensen has a new movie out called The Dead Don’t Hurt. And, in that same interview, the King of Gondor did admit he would be interested in returning to the franchise for the upcoming The Hunt for Gollum.

“Sure,” Mortensen said. “I don’t know exactly what the story is, I haven’t heard. Maybe I’ll hear about it eventually. I like playing that character. I learned a lot playing the character. I enjoyed it a lot. I would only do it if I was right for it in terms of, you know, the age I am now and so forth. I would only do it if I was right for the character. It would be silly to do it otherwise.”

Read more from the actor/director over at GQ.

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