#The Cuntybago

[charlidos]

THE CHRONICLES OF THE CUNTYBAGO

I love the lore of the Fellowship, I can't get enough of it. And it's really turned into a kind of myth, hasn't it? The stories have been established, from being told again and again. Regardless if it's not the whole truth, or even not true at all. The lore has a life of its own. And it changes, depedning on who's talking, and over time.

The lore of the (inappropriately named) Cuntybago is a favourite; that famed make-up trailer bus where Orlando spent so much time with Viggo (hours and hours for years and years if you listen to Orlando) absorbing everything Viggo did.

So here's the Ultimate (very long) Cuntybago Post.

The Cuntybago is apparently where all the after-work parties happened. Most of what actually happened on it is still secret, private events not to be shared; after hours, after some wine/whisky drinking. What kind of special stuff was in the drawers? What did they really smoke? And, most intriguingly, who exactly was left onboard when everyone were ordered to get out... (Erm, V&O, perhaps?)I'm sure there are many more photos from the bus. Like a photo of Viggo & Orlando - which has yet to be seen. Oh, to have been a fly on that wall!

(A clip from the last day of the reshoots, in 2003. Because it's the time the bus has been talked about the most. Even if I'm unsure if this is the actual Cuntybago or not. Since it doesn't look green...)

Mortensen and Orlando Bloom spent much of their off-time on a green bus they named the "Cunty-Bago." Instead of the standard luxury lodging demanded by most stars on set, Viggo and co-star Orlando Bloom shared a converted bus while filming Rings. Viggo stocked the bus with a wine cellar and wallpapered the inside with candid behind-the-scenes photos. A source on the set said the bus was the site of frequent cast parties, with the motto, "Everyone is welcome, but when it's time to go, get out!" Indeed, they formed a club — The Cunty-Bago Club. [Viggo, Sean and Orlando] shared a make-up Winnebago, and through hours of beard and pointy-ear application formulated the rules of their society — most of which boil down to getting gossip and posting it on. [on what? I think the text is cut?]

There are very few quotes from Viggo. If you read his old interviews about life on set it sounds like he mostly worked 6 days a week, 14 hours a day. And in his free time, he went camping and fishing by himself and just drove around to get some me-time. That's it. It all sounds like mostly work and no play for Viggo. Cementing this image of him being ever serene, wise and a hard working method actor who never stopped being Aragorn. But then, we have the stories of this bus, which shows his wilder side...

(Viggo in ponytails, with a glass of wine and banana, in front of that mirror covered in photographs. They both took a lot of photos on set, so I guess a bunch of those photos are Orlando's.)

All Viggo's said is this:

"It was a crazy small bus." "Everything had cunt. It was 'cunt this' and 'cunt that'. We had a cuntmas tree, and we had cuntmas angels."

(Orlando on the makeup bus. )

Orlando has mostly mentioned the bus in passing, as he loves on Viggo, his great hero. And in his words, it always sounds like it was just the two of them... (when in fact it was from time to time also shared with Sean B, Bernard and Liv - but only Viggo & Orlando were there the whole time).

[Me and Viggo would] sit next to each other for a couple or hours each morning in a make-up truck. You get to know someone that way, more than by being in scenes with them. I used to sit next to him on the make-up bus, and find myself just staring at him while he was having his make-up done and drawing in his book or writing his notes. I would find myself fascinated. When I went back for re-shoots, I was on my own and he wasn't sitting there, and I suddenly was sitting in the makeup bus that we'd been driving around in for 18 months in New Zealand and got really emotional and felt that it was kind of weird to be there without him there and sort of reflected on all of the happy conversations and chats and glasses of wine and talks that we would have at the end of the day or whatever. He really had a huge impact on my life as an actor.

But he did say a few specific things too:

"Ahhh yes, the bus. It was mine, all mine. It was my precious." Bloom christened the bus the "C-word" when the makeup artist was fuming about someone and asked Bloom's advice. "You should kick him in the cunt and tell him to fuck off!" Viggo just lost it for half an hour. He kept saying, 'What did you say?' [The bus] became all about "the word. We took that word and took all of its power away. We made it the most loving word in the world. If you were a true cunt, you were the most amazing person in the world. It was a very free-spirited bus. It came about because me and Viggo kept being moved around, and we ended up on this bus one day. And the actors were fed up and we said, "This is it. This is our home and we are not moving. If they come, tell them to go away."

And finally from Orlando's IG in 2019 (obviously, to this day, a very important part of his life):

Our fondly named makeup bus, christened by Noreen my makeup artist and Viggo Mortensen, was, and remains in my heart and memory the most female and male empowered, joyful, disreputable and yet totally respectful place of work and creativity ever. Hours spent in the the makeup chair to apply ear’s and wigs and contacts." (They can't even agree who named it, Noreen never got any credit back then...)

(From the reshoots in 2003, Viggo gives Orlando some love and points out the photo message from Orlando on the mirror. But I want to know, who put up the pic of O with Brad Pitt? From this clip.)

The comments from everyone else in the cast about life on the Cuntybago are actually more enlightening. The rowdy gang reveal another side of life on set and of Viggo: as a drinking, partying prankster who loves crude language. It's definitely part of the fascination with Viggo. He's never one to talk about these things himself.

(I think they're wearing the special cuntebago t-shirts here. No idea from whence.)

Bernard Hill:

You are not supposed to know about it!" "There were five or six of us - Viggo, Orlando and Sean [Bean]. Liv came in and out [of the group]. Viggo has this special kind of crudeness that he is capable of. We were in the same make up bus [along with Bloom]. When I came back [from a break] it was called the Cuntybago. It was our private club. We had wine tasting sessions and had lots of parties. We also kept lots of food in there. Anything that was out [on the table], you could have. You could drink it, eat it, borrow it, smoke it… but don´t go looking in any drawers. That´s where we kept our 'special stuff'! [The Cuntybago bar would on occasion open very early] like 6:30am. There were days that we needed it. [I've made life-long friends with] everybody who was in the Cuntybago. Leaving the first time was such a huge wrench. Especially because of the Cuntybago, it was like our club. Fortunately we managed to get it back for Return of the king reshoots, so ROTK was the Return of the Cuntybago. We actually drove it out onto the streets for Viggo’s farewell. Viggo didn’t know we were going to do it, and when it started moving, you should have seen his face. I kept shouting, “Cunty libre! Cunty libre!” And the bus start leaving—we were breaking free. For propriety’s sake it was called the C-Bago Club, because you couldn’t put Cunty on the call sheet. Sean Bean came in, Liv was also a part of it. As soon as I get back to England I’m going to start the C-Bago web site: Orlando will do fashion and Viggo will do current affairs. I’ll probably do gossip — you know, the social calendar. Liv will do Hollywood and Sean Bean will do the art of war. It’ll be our little corner of the world.

(Bernard & Orlando Bloom getting make-up done. Here's the green bus again.)

Elijah:

Cuntybago is an amalgamation of 'Winnebago' and Viggo Mortensen´s cuss word of choice. I've gained an appreciation of the word cunt. Negative words - the best thing is to diffuse them by using and taking the meaning away. Cunt! Cunt! It's a great, great word. Very forceful. [Viggo] became utterly fascinated with it and it became the word of the film. Their Winnebago for makeup was called the Cuntybago. I was not a part of the Cuntybago unfortunately - it was the makeup room of Orlando, Viggo and Sean Bean - but it was a lovely place to visit. Cuntybago T-shirts were made up. There was a Cunty Christmas and we had a Cunty Christmas tree, all this stuff. Cate Blanchett [who plays the elf queen Galadriel] was deemed Her Cuntliness. I think we were all secretly jealous of the Cuntybago. I was anyway. I loved the atmosphere. Any place that had Viggo in the centre was always an interesting place to be… And that was where all the alcohol was. It was just spending all of that time with brits and Aussies. The word ‘Cunt’ came up quite a lot. I was fascinated by that and how it could become not so dirty. It’s one of the few swear words that still shock people." Is that why you called Cate Blanchett “Her Cuntliness? “Not my creation. She was called that by Viggo Mortensen. I put the blame on him. It was used during the making of the movie and seems a bit silly now. Wood says that his Cuntybago T-shirt is home in a drawer. "It's too big for me. I'm a small guy."

(A few photos up on the mirror in front of Viggo. I'm guessing it's Henry on the toilet (aww!), and Viggo and Orlando doing something something... Sharing a cigarette? Extinguishing a cigarette on Viggo's tongue? It looks kind of erotic. And who's the other dude?)

Billy:

"On Lord of the rings we'd go to Viggo and Orlando's trailer which was called The Cuntybago. Viggo was good for getting Irish whiskey, which was great but I keep trying to educate him on malt whisky. (To Billy it was just V&O's trailer. Like it's where they lived together...) Hobbits, an elf, a King of Men, maybe a dwarf. And quite a few times a wizard, sometimes a princess. Ha ha! That's enough to make anyone feel pissed. We had some good times on that one, some great times."

Peter Jackson:

"The actors had a spiritual connection to it. I liked the way they had photographs [Mortensen and Bloom] taken behind-the-scenes, plastered all over the walls."

(From the reshoots, I think. Beautifully blurry.)

Liv Tyler:

I can't believe he [Mortensen] talked about that. That was our private world. There was a lot of liquor on that bus. But the funniest thing about this bus is that this thing was a beast. It was so tiny; nothing worked. If they ever washed our hair it would go from scalding hot to freezing cold. There was no heat. Our makeup trailer became the center of things. It was given a really bad name that I cannot repeat. There were pranks, most of them also too dirty to tell. I love them all, all my costars. We would hang out mostly in the hair-and-makeup trailer, and after work at dinner. We would eat all the time and drink wine and laugh.  I think that a lot of that was the friendships that we made with each other and the fact that we all needed each other. It was vital that we all had each other to survive and to be able to laugh. Everybody had a really good sense of humor, thank God. We'd be constantly making jokes and decorating the trailer with ridiculous things and being rude and that was our sort of little bubble of escape in our makeup trailer.

(Photo by Liv, in the bus. You can see all the polaroids and stuff behind the unicorn elf.)

Cate Blanchett:

Viggo is the funkiest person I've ever met. I am far too polite to . . . he had this thing he called "the cunty-bago" . . . no, I guess I shouldn't go into that. So, yeah, he's incredible, very funny.

So, I can't quite figure out which bus The Cuntybago actually is: the green one Orlando is seen exiting? Or the yellow-ish one seen in the vids from the reshoots? Because they aren't the same. And in the vid from the final day, Bernard says the bus he drove on that last day was the same they'd had "for years" and which never moved before. While Orlando said they drove The Cuntybago around "for 18 months". So which bus was it? And did they drive the bus around or not? Or was it stationary? It's a mystery.

(This is the green bus - but is it the make-up trailer? Same as in the vid with Bernard.)

(Here in the reshoots, the bus is yellow-ish? And completely different. Looks more like a Winnebago than the green one really... So which one is The Cuntybago?)

ETA: it's the green striped one! Here's it's on the Cuntybago shirt:

That's all I have found about this infamous, mythical place, where all the magic happened, as they say. If anyone has info to add, please do! I want this post to be comprehensive!

[the-noir-symphony]

Viggorli & the acting choice

I just wanna talk about Viggo's acting choice here. This scene is about Legolas returning the Evenstar to Aragorn. Due to the positions of their hands, Aragorn couldn't see what Legolas gave him. It's probably something trivial or not important at all. If you received something unknown from your platonic friend, what would you do? Of course, open your palm and let your friend drop whatever that thing is into your hand.

However, as we can see, Viggo chose to act as if Aragorn grabbed Legolas' hand without needing to know what exactly Legolas was giving him. He held Orlando's hand just a little too tight and Orlando rested his hand in Viggo's wrapped one just a little longer than necessary.

So there are two possibilities: Either Viggo just wanted to grab Orlando's hand because he could, OR in his mind, everything Legolas gives to Aragorn is precious enough that didn't even need to see what it was.

Either way, this scene is one of the gayest scenes in the trilogy, and the acting choice here is something that a lot of fans still wonder about.

Or Peter just said to them: 'Listen mates, they want to cut Arwen's scene, so we must replace it with something romantic and flirty to make Eowyn's hope die. Just act like you two usually do every night in that Cuntybago.'

[charlidos]

A follow-up to my ultimate cuntybago post:

Viggo himself solved my issue with which of the buses that was The Cuntybago. Because here he is, in all his glory (and very shiny hair - he looks like he's in the Bee Gees or something), in The Cuntybago t-shirt with a pic of the bus on it!

So, seems The Cuntybago IS the bus with the green stripe and not the yellow-ish thing shown in the clip from the reshoots. So all the photos and such must have been moved from one bus to the other? Or what? It's still very mysterious.

But at least I can rest assured it's this first bus, from the original filming, and not the impersonator-bus from the reshoot.

[charlidos]

Do you miss Aragorn at all? There are a couple of things that I miss about playing Aragorn. Like when we would get ready to shoot every morning, always in the same costumes and we would joke, that was already a different kind of mutual communication than what is usual at most shoots. We really spent a lot of time together.

Viggo in 2004.

Getting ready in the make-up trailer, I assume? So much happy time spent together! In the Cuntybago, on set, in bed.