Did you know that in 1983 Viggo was hit by a car? And of course he talks about it in an interesting way
“I got hit in the head once while I was living in New York,” he says, making a tidy segue while on the topic of injuries. “It was 1983, and I was trying to make it as an actor and working at a restaurant in the garment district. It was Sunday afternoon and very quiet. I had the Times in my hand and I was crossing the street when a car ran through a red light and hit me in the hip. I shot into the air and the newspaper went flying, then I got hit in the head and then I had no feeling. It was very dreamy and I thought I was paralyzed. I was lying on the street, bleeding out of the back of my head, when a wino bent down in front of my face. He smelled like strawberry wine and his hair was greasy, and he put his hand under the back of my head and said, ‘Feels kind of mushy.’ Then he looked around and said, ‘I gotta go. Korea.’ And like an apparition, he was gone.”
“You must have thought, ‘This is it.’”
“I did,” he says. “Something like that makes you pay attention to your surroundings. As an artist you observe the world. Sometimes it takes an accident to make you appreciate why you’re here, and you ask yourself, ‘What can I do to contribute to the world."
It's from this article: https://nuvomagazine.com/magazine/autumn-2007/viggo-mortensen?srsltid=AfmBOoorvv5018lCt8-VhnXLFwghBsHn9Vchr0-Lr8ZdKCDN2NFHFCDI
The whole article is very good!