Viggo Mortensen and the Hardest-Working Facial Hair in Hollywood

There is nothing in film that frames a character or that moves a story along more than facial hair. And if you’re an actor with a unique look like Viggo Mortensen, changes to your facial coif are your bread and butter. To understand this, just look at the trailer for his new Civil War–era drama, The Dead Don’t Hurt. In the two and a half minutes, Viggo sports three different facial hair styles, as his mustache and beard set the stage for the twists and twirls of his character Holger Olsen’s narrative journey.

When I finished the trailer, a few thoughts ripped through my head. The first one was simple: I know Shakespeare said that the eyes are the window to the soul. But after watching this, I can say that’s bullshit. Eyes have the potential to lie and deceive. What always tells the truth is what is on your upper lip or chin. Or at least that’s the case with my man Viggo.

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This trailer also got me wondering whether you could make the case that Mortensen has the hardest-working facial hair in Hollywood. Can you think of anyone else you’ve seen rock more styles than him? Is there anyone else whose facial hair tells more about where their character is emotionally then Viggo? From his early soap opera days as the sultry smuggler Bragg who sported a wispy porn stache in Search for Tomorrow, to the resolute but headed-off-the-rails bushy-bearded Ben from Captain Fantastic, it is clear that Viggo is the king of the facial hair plot pushers.

To prove my hypothesis that beards don’t lie and to celebrate Viggo’s arrival back in our lives with The Dead Don’t Hurt, I present to you my definitive taxonomy of Viggo Mortensen’s facial hair.

To create this, I combed through all 64 of the movies and TV shows he has made to date and organized his roles into nine categories of facial hair types that tell you what type of classic Hollywood archetype Viggo is playing. I’ve also limited this to only roles in which he sports a goatee, mustache, stubble, or full beard because clean-shaven people are nearly impossible to predict or trust. Fun fact: This is why everyone’s favorite president is Honest Abe.

So, without further ado—let’s parse a few hairs and get down to business.

The Circle (Or: The Down-on-His-Luck and Possibly Criminal Cuck)

Viggo characters: Jerome, Salvation! (1987); Lalin, Carlito’s Way (1993); Wes, Gospel According to Harry (1994); Agustín and Pedro, Everybody Has a Plan (2012)

When Viggo is sporting a circle—the mustache connects to the chin beard in a circular pattern—you’re almost certainly watching a character who’s about to get cucked. Sure, it might not be a traditional cuckolding in Viggo’s case, but each of his characters who have sported this look are definitely watching from the corner. Take Lalin from Carlito’s Way. He’s a man who used to have the world on a string, rolled side by side with the Carlitos of the world, and rocked a clean-shaven look. But now, he finds himself carrying his diapers in his wheelchair and being forced to try to dime out Al Pacino using a poorly placed wire. It frankly comes as no surprise when Carlito shushes him and puts a knife to his throat just below his wispy circle.

In Gospel According to Harry, we see another form of cuck as Viggo is locked in a dream bed that he can’t escape. It is an hour-and-a-half dream version of cuckolding for a man who is a codependent in an unhappy and discontented marriage. Talk about a nightmare scenario.

Finally, in Salvation! we have achieved final form, where our man Viggo is cuckolded by none other than God. Or at least his vessel, who seems a lot like a cheap version of Jim Bakker. If you’ve never seen it before, this movie is a much-maligned religious satire, but it may be worth a watch if you’re into angry and abusive men whose wives leave them to become Christian rock drummers and Tammy Faye Bakker–like stars in the televangelical world. Goddamn the circle.

It is also important to note that the circle made a bold appearance at the 2022 Oscars. If only Chris Rock had realized that Will Smith was sporting this style, he may have remembered not to fuck with the cuck.

The Chevron (Or: The Man of Principle, but With a Softer Side)

Viggo characters: Diego, Captain Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer (2006); Holger, The Dead Don’t Hurt (2024)

Twenty-five seconds into the trailer for The Dead Don’t Hurt, we catch the first glimpse of our man Holder. He’s sitting on a bench in 1860s San Francisco, speaking softly to his love interest, Vivienne, and sporting an absolutely fabulous Chevron mustache (a thick and almost upside-down V shape—pointing slightly away from the edges of the top lip, named for its resemblance to the Chevron logo) that tells you everything you need to know. This is a man who is proud, who takes care of himself, and who lives a simple life built on his own code of honor. He can be rigid but is soft and caring at his core.

The same goes for Diego Alatriste in The Spanish Musketeer. Though he is a flawed man and fighter, Diego shows his honor and softer side by helping take care of his dead friend’s son and by sometimes sparing the lives of the people he is hired to kill.

In addition to Viggo, fellow icons of the Chevron, including the great Ted Lasso, the cranky but lovable Ron Swanson, the iconic Magnum P.I., and everyone’s favorite Detroit cop—Axel Foley—also support this theory.

The Lampshade (Or: The Villainous Douche)

Viggo characters: Phillip, The Crew (1987); Master Chief John James Urgayle, G.I. Jane (1997)

Once you know what a lampshade mustache is, it should come as no surprise to anyone that this character is bound to be bad. The lampshade lacks all the glory of the mustaches that extend beyond the mouth and that have any character at all. Instead, it looks like a brown smudge that lingered there after whoever was sporting it stuck their nose way up the asshole of whoever they had to kiss to rise to the top.

To see this in action, look no further than Master Chief John James Urgayle from G.I. Jane. This is the misogynist-in-chief and someone who threatens to sexually assault Demi Moore’s character when she stands up to him. No wonder he got shot at the end of the movie. He was a total piece of shit.

A close runner-up to the master chief is Phillip from the lesser-known movie The Crew. This film was panned, and Phillip the lawyer was decried as a vain, whiny, and ultimately unlikable douche. Maybe if he’d let his mustache hairs live a little, things would have worked out differently.

The Horseshoe (Or: The Determined but Violent Man)

Viggo characters: John W. Poe, Young Guns II (1990); Gunnar, Jauja (2014)

The arrival of the horseshoe—think of an upside-down U surrounding the top lip—in a Viggo film is a dead giveaway that a violent but dedicated man is on a mission. In the case of John W. Poe, Viggo’s character in Young Guns II, his search for Billy the Kid and his gang knows no bounds, and he doesn’t care about the body count he’s racking up. Similarly, in Jauja, we see that Gunnar is a man lost in an unforgiving and foreign world who is set on getting his daughter back at all costs.

Fellow sporters of the horseshoe also tell the same story. See Richard Roundtree in Shaft, Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, Sam Elliott in Tombstone, and even Ben Stiller in Dodgeball.

The Van Dyke (Or: The I Understand This World, but I Still Think It’s Fucked Up)

Viggo character: Everett, Appaloosa (2008)

One of the true outliers of Viggo’s facial hair career is his turn in Appaloosa, the Ed Harris–directed Western. In the film, Viggo sports a Van Dyke, which is a unique beard style, named after the 17th-century Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck, that demands that your mustache and chin hair cannot touch under any circumstances. And God forbid that you have any hair on your cheeks at all. When a man sports this style, you can be sure that he will be a man who sees the flaws in the system but lets things abide for a while. Well, at least, that is, until it’s time to fuck it up a bit. And then that’s exactly what he does.

Interestingly, those who sport the Van Dyke in other films are also pretty similar in nature. For example, think about Cypher in The Matrix, who understands the system he is in and tolerates it until he can’t anymore. Or Robert Downey Jr. in Zodiac—though some people might dare to call that an anchor or royale beard instead since these are variations that extend the mustaches down and beards out slightly to the sides.

Stubble Trouble (Or: Where Sexy Meets Street Smart, but Things Also Get Serious)

Viggo characters: Clay, The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995); Aragorn, The Fellowship of the Ring (2001); Aragorn, The Two Towers (2002); Aragorn, The Return of the King (2003); Frank, Hidalgo (2004); Agustín and Pedro, Everybody Has a Plan (2012); Holger, The Dead Don’t Hurt (2024)

Just looking at the sheer number of movies in which Viggo has rocked the stubble (from short to mid to high), it’s clear this is a large part of the secret to his special sauce. Through the stubble we can always see a man who is not only wearing the weight of the world on his shoulders, but also has the knowledge and know-how to get through it.

When we first see Strider (soon to be called Aragorn) in the Prancing Pony in The Fellowship of the Ring, he’s wearing all the telltale signs of a villain. He has his cloak pulled over his head, he is staring creepily at young man/boy hobbits, and the bartender says he’s sketchy as fuck. But in reality, what we have is a man who has really just been ridden hard and put away wet. Yet there is still a magic about him. Or at least that’s what I call it when you can land both Liv Tyler and a kingship in a movie. Not bad, my man. Not bad at all.

Before his Lord of the Rings run, Viggo also put on a serious clinic for how sexy a man in stubble can be in the unbelievable film The Passion of Darkly Noon. In this flick, Viggo plays a literal mute coffin builder who somehow nabs Ashley Judd and then helps to fend off a violent attack from a murderous Brendan Fraser, who is wrapped in barbed wire and covered in blood. Though this is the stuff that nightmares are made of, Viggo’s Clay deftly navigates it and somehow wins a weird-ass giant shoe at the end.

For our final example of stubble trouble, I humbly suggest that we jump back to the trailer for The Dead Don’t Hurt. At just under a minute and a half in, we get a glimpse of a disturbed and distressed Holger, who is wracked with guilt over the decision to leave his family to join the Union Army and fight slavery. (Yes—Viggo is back to solve racial relations again!!!!) As Vivienne pleads, “This isn’t your fight,” we see that the glory of his magnificent Chevron has faded and our man is now wearing a wearied and stubbled shadow that conveys to us one of life’s great truths—that when the going gets tough, the first thing to go is the razor. That is, unless you’re Harrison Ford in The Fugitive.

The Boxed Beard (Or: The You May Think I’m Charming, but I’m Evil at My Core)

Viggo characters: Johnny, Deception (1992); Lucifer, The Prophecy (1995); Hombre, Gimlet (1995)

When you see the boxed beard, get ready to sit back and ride the sleazeball train. Charming at first but potentially deadly, this beard first shows itself in Viggo’s 1992 film, Deception, where he plays a man who fakes his death, which then leads his wife (Andie MacDowell) to chase a trail of baseball cards with clues on them (yes, I know this makes no sense) to find him. At some point along her mission to find him, she wants to move on from him and start a new life with Dr. Fergus Lamb (Liam Neeson). But Johnny can’t stand that, so we finally get our script flip, and bam—Viggo, now sporting a boxed beard, starts hunting her!

The story of the boxed beard is a little simpler in 1995’s The Prophecy. In this film, Viggo is playing none other than Lucifer himself. And while he has his moments of charm and humor, he does offer up some ultimatums that reveal his evil inner core—including this gem he exchanges with Virginia Madsen’s character Katherine.

Lucifer: “Hello, Katherine” [in a creepy voice].

Katherine: “I can’t … I can’t do this.”

Lucifer: “I can lay you out and fill your mouth with your mother’s feces. Or we can talk.”

Yum.

The boxed beard strikes again.

The Garibaldi (Or: The Man Who Craves Independence and Freedom but Is Still in a Cage)

Viggo character: Ben, Captain Fantastic (2016)

Often referred to as the hipster beard, the Garibaldi—named after 19th-century Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi—is a full beard style that has a wild bushiness to it but that still screams of order and purpose. And so it makes sense that Ben—the king of outdoor hipsterdom and faux anarchism—would sport this look. To be a hipster (at least a real one) means that you must say that you are shunning the trappings of mainstream life to live outside the cultural norm. However, in reality, you are often quite involved in life’s trappings, and your commentary on the things you hate is the very thing that traps you in it. For Ben and this family, this couldn’t be more true. They wear trendy ’70s-style clothes, they learn the great books, they memorize the Bill of Rights, and they continually provide commentary about the world they are in theory trying to shun.

For Ben, everything comes crashing down when he realizes the central conflict of his life: His actions endangered his kids and played a key role in his wife’s passing. So it comes as no surprise that when Ben makes the grown-up call to leave the kids with his father-in-law, it’s time for the Garibaldi to go.

We also have seen similar characteristics among other Garibaldi’d men. Some of the greats are Tormund Giantsbane (Redbeard) from Game of Thrones, Tom Hardy in Peaky Blinders, Oscar Isaac in Dune, and James Harden—whose nickname is literally “The Beard”—from the Thunder, Rockets, Nets, Sixers, and now Clippers. (Though maybe if you trim it, James, you’ll finally get over the hump.)

The Yeard (Or: The I Will Survive Only to Protect My Family or Avenge Them)

Viggo’s characters: Man, The Road (2009); Holger, The Dead Don’t Hurt (2024)

The plot of The Road is pretty similar to the story of Rick and Carl in the first few seasons of The Walking Dead. There is nothing a father won’t do to protect his son. And while you’re doing it, facial hair grooming be damned because that’s what really separates this beard from the Garibaldi, and that’s what gives Viggo’s character “Man” his edge.

Again, in The Dead Don’t Hurt, we also see a similar facial hair style on Holger. Gone is the meticulously sculpted ’stache of a prideful and kept man. Instead, in its place is the ultimate beard marker of the broken man—the yeard. This wild and unruly beard is the look of choice for a man whose world has been taken from him and who has to deal with the harsh reality of his choices. Coincidentally, it is also the quintessential revenge beard—for it tells us that while our hero may live on, it will be only to protect someone else or to fuck you up for what you did to him.

A classic example of the Yeard comes from Viking warrior Alexander Skarsgard in The Northman, who has no time to chop a beard but who will cut you down fast with an axe. Also on top of Mount Yeardmore are a trio of revenge seekers who all somehow cross paths with a bear (or at least a bear trap) on their way to wreak havoc: Leo DiCaprio in The Revenant, Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in The Silencing.

Now that we’re nearing the end, it is hard not to notice that some of Viggo’s most iconic roles are when he sported a clean-shaven look. So, to prove to you my unifying theory that facial hair is the real truth teller and that the smooth shaven are running a con on you, here is one last bonus category.

Bonus Category: Clean-Shaven (Or: The I’m Probably Untrustworthy)

Classic clean-shaven Viggo characters: Tex, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990); Nick Davis, American Yakuza (1993); Weps, Crimson Tide (1995); David Shaw, A Perfect Murder (1998); Tom Stall, A History of Violence (2005); Nikolai, Eastern Promises (2007); Saul Tenser, Crimes of the Future (2022)

I’ve said it before: Clean-shaven people just aren’t totally trustworthy in movies. And that goes for Viggo all the way. Take his character Tom Stall in the action thriller A History of Violence, which was directed by the “Baron of Blood,” David Cronenberg. Pretending to be a down-to-earth, diner-owning family man until he can’t any longer, Viggo eventually reveals to his family that he is a cold-blooded killer. So how does he do that? By having to admit that he’s a former mafia hitman from Philadelphia, then basically committing sexual assault on his wife on a staircase and ultimately murdering his own brother. Yikes. Are you starting to see what I’m saying about clean-shaven people???

If you want more proof, look no further than another gem of a film Viggo did with Cronenberg, Eastern Promises. In this role, Viggo plays Nikolai, who is a “cleaner” and enforcer in the Russian mafia but who somehow has time to serve as an undercover agent for the FSB and British government. He gets Scotland Yard to charge his boss with rape and then takes over as head of the crime family. Are you sensing a theme now?

Finally, if you want the icing on the cake, then look no further than Viggo’s character David Shaw in the 1998 crime thriller A Perfect Murder. As the movie begins, we discover that David is having an affair with Emily (Gwyneth Paltrow). However, it turns out that clean-shaven Viggo is not who we think he is! I’m shocked, I tell you! Instead, he turns out to be Winston Lagrange (which is a name that no one in real life would ever have), an ex-con who likes to steal money from rich and vulnerable women. Then the plot really jumps the shark again, as Emily’s husband, Steven (played by Michael Douglas), tries to blackmail Viggo and get him to kill Emily. But we get another shocker, because even though he almost goes through with it, David ends up double-crossing Steven and bam—our criminal turns out to be a semi-hero. Or, as I like to put it—yet another untrustworthy clean-shaven schmuck.

To put a bow on this and not just list out the absolute shit ton of clean-shaven characters who ooze untrustworthiness, I will just point you in the direction of some bona fide studies that tell you the bold truth—bearded men are better looking and more trustworthy. So suck it, stubble-less freaks.

Matt Heard lives in Nashville and writes about movies, pop culture, and the environment. His work has appeared in Sierra Magazine, AMC Outdoors, Woods Reader, and elsewhere