Viggo Mortensen Talks about Walter Salles & OTR

 If Viggo Mortensen thought it was weird to be approached to play Sigmund Freud, he was even more surprised at being offered the (thinly veiled) role of William Burroughs in Walter Salles' version of Jack Kerouac's "Beat bible" On The Road.

 Mortensen, who's promoting his role as the father of modern psychiatry at TIFF in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, said he might have said no if Freud hadn't worked.

"Walter seems like a very nice man, and On The Road is a book I read and enjoyed reading. And I knew it was one of those books people like Francis Ford Coppola had been trying to make for decades.

"But when I read the book, the last person I'd have seen myself playing was Bull Lee, the William Burroughs character." (Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund play the leads Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in the just-wrapped film).

"But I kind of said to myself, 'Don't forget you were surprised by David's idea you could play Freud. And they both were mentors in a way. You had people like Jung came to Freud for advice. And (Allen) Ginsberg and Kerouac and other authors went to Burroughs to soak up his knowledge."

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