Viggo and Other Nude Dudes
I had no idea when I arranged to see the new Viggo Mortensen movie, “Eastern Promises,” this Friday, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music matinee of “King Lear,” with Ian McKellen, this Saturday, that I was enrolling myself not in a mini-reprise of actors from “Lord of the Rings” but a short course in actors the media is currently calling “Lords of the Ding-a-Lings.” For in this film and this stage production both Mortensen (in the drawing here) and McKellen (whose “Lear” just opened to mostly rave reviews) get naked. Totally, full-frontal, not-for-just-my-wife-or-my lover naked. And in an oh-so-American display of either Puritanism or reverse-Puritanism, websites have been devoting column, um, inches, to male nudity. Here’s one such piece from the New York Observer and another from the New York Post. Silly me: I thought the discussion of “Eastern Promises” would revolve around its extreme violence, its faces and limbs being bloodily blown away. Instead we’re talking about Mortensen naked in a steamroom. The theater, to its credit, tends to be a lot more relaxed about such matters: “Hair,” with its fragrant fleshiness, happened forty years ago. That was, of course, before movie stills of an actor in the all-together could whiz round the world on the Internet, making the decision to go buff less indelible than it is now. What’s more, a naked actor onstage tends not to be in extreme, rewind-to-peek-again close-up. On the other hand, a nude theater actor is being stared at in real time: dealing with that is not something they tend to teach you in drama school.
