Listen up, Aragorn hive: we’ve got two new tidbits for you

In the Lord Of The Rings series, the beautiful thing about Aragorn, son of Arathorn, is that he’s almost immortal. He’s not quite as immortal as his love, Arwen, or any of her elven bretheren, but he is more immortal than the average human. That’s because he belongs to a special race of men called the Dúnedain, who enjoy longer average lifespans than regular people, if they don’t get killed in battle or ambush or any of myriad of other ways people die in fantasy series. In the original trilogy, Aragorn is meant to be around 87 years old, even though he looks great for his age. Why, then, should he not return as a strapping 107-year-old in Peter Jackson’s latest venture into Middle Earth?

The possibility isn’t as far fetched as fans who haven’t spent time with Aragorn since he was crowned the King of Gondor might expect. In a new interview with GQ, Viggo Mortensen didn’t exactly say he was on board for the new Jackson-produced LOTR movie—a story directed by Andy Serkis titled The Hunt For Gollum—but he didn’t say no either. “Sure,” he said, to be exact. “I don’t know exactly what the story is, I haven’t heard. Maybe I’ll hear about it eventually.”

“I like playing that character. I learned a lot playing the character. I enjoyed it a lot,” he continued. “I would only do it if I was right for it in terms of, you know, the age I am now and so forth. I would only do it if I was right for the character. It would be silly to do it otherwise.”

If this level of care for the character himself doesn’t make it clear that Mortensen is as much of a fanboy as the rest of us, the fact that he actually used his original LOTR sword in his new movie, The Dead Don’t Hurt, sure will. Speaking about a fantasy sequence from the film, which Mortensen wrote, directed, produced, and stars in, the actor-director explained that his team had everything ready to go except for the perfect sword.

“I did look and there were some good ones and I thought, well, it might be kind of good to use this one that I had (Andúril) because it’s really good,” he said. “I knew I would have to ask permission because I’m sure somebody would notice it, even if you only see it for a few seconds, it’s not really essential to the scene and certainly not to the movie, it’s just something in passing that you either see or you don’t.” After securing the necessary sign offs from Peter Jackson and the studio, Andúril was officially unsheathed. “That’s why we did it, just because it seemed right. It was kind of a last-minute accident.”

While we still have to wait a while to see Aragorn back on our screens (if it happens at all), it sounds like The Dead Don’t Hurt is—at least for the time being—the next best thing. The Western premieres in theaters tomorrow, May 31. You can watch a trailer below: