Hollywood actor Viggo Mortensen has criticised Spain's far-right party Vox for tweeting an image of his Lord of the Rings character, Aragorn, to promote their political agenda.
On election day last month, Vox posted an image of Aragorn with the Spanish flag and its party emblem on his back confronting an enemy army representing left-wing, feminist, LGBT and separatist groups. The tweet read: “Let the battle begin! #ForSpain”
⚔🇪🇸 ¡Qué comience la batalla! #PorEspaña pic.twitter.com/TVgdcP1Kw5
— VOX 🇪🇸 (@vox_es) April 28, 2019
Mortensen, a fluent Spanish speaker who grew up in Argentina, hit back on Tuesday in a letter to Spanish newspaper El Pais, describing the tweet as "ignorant" and "absurd".
“You’d have to be pretty ignorant to think that using the character […] to promote the campaign of a xenophobic, ultra-right party like Vox would be a good idea,” wrote Mortensen. “I would laugh at their ineptitude but Vox has won 24 seats in Congress. It’s no joke and we will have to be alert and proactive just like Aragorn is in Tolkien's story.
“It’s even more ridiculous to use the character of Aragorn, a polyglot statesman that advocates for the awareness and inclusion of the various races, customs and languages of Middle Earth, to legitimise an anti-immigration, anti-feminist and Islamophobic political group.”
Warner Bros Spain, which has local distribution rights to the film, said it had not authorised the use of its copyrighted property in any campaigns.
The Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) secured the most seats at the election but failed to win a parliamentary majority.
