“The story of the (upper-lip) scar isn’t glamorous. Okay, maybe it is, a little, because of the costume...I hurt myself at a party in St. Lawrence University when I was 17. I was really drunk, dressed up as David Bowie from the Aladdin Sane era. I fell face-forward into some barbed wire. They tell me the lip was hanging off my face, but I don’t remember. They didn’t even anaesthetize me before sewing me up, but that also wasn’t heroic. I was incredibly drunk.”

Viggo Mortensen, 2005

"I was running through the bushes and being chased. Then I got shoved into a barbed-wire fence. Stupid really. It made a fucking mess - the blood and the smeared lightning bolt..."

Viggo Mortensen, ContactMusic.com, 4 May 2004

UGO: What's the best music concert you've even been to?

VIGGO: David Bowie in Buffalo. He got arrested. He was arrested in the elevator by a very pretty woman who asked him if he wanted to go smoke a joint or something like that.

Viggo Mortensen, interview on UnderGroundOnline, 2005