Trivia: Critically acclaimed actor Viggo Mortensen made his feature-film debut playing Alexander Godunov's Amish brother in Witness (1985). The suave, handsome actor has subsequently portrayed a wide variety of characters, often unapologetic bad boys, opposite some of Hollywood's most popular actors, including Sylvester Stallone, Demi Moore, and Nicole Kidman.Born in New York City, on October 20, 1958, to an American mother and a Danish father, Mortensen spent his first years in Manhattan and the rest of his youth living in Argentina, Venezuela, and Denmark. Returning to Manhattan in the early '80s, he studied acting at Warren Robertson's Theatre Workshop and then embarked upon a stage career before moving to Los Angeles. There, he earned a Dramalogue Critics Award for his performance in a Coast Playhouse production of Bent and became a familiar figure on the L.A. punk scene (something that was aided by his brief marriage to Exene Cervenka, lead singer of the punk band X). Following his debut in Witness, Mortensen began working steadily in a number of diverse films, becoming a familiar but not instantly recognizable face to filmgoers. He did some of his more memorable work as a series of louts and villains, in such films as The Indian Runner (1991, written and directed by Sean Penn), which cast him as David Morse's morally questionable brother; Carlito's Way (1993), in which he played a paraplegic ex-con who tries to snitch on Al Pacino; and The Prophecy (aka God's Army) (1995), which required the actor, in the role of Lucifer, to rip out Christopher Walken's heart and then eat it. Mortensen finally attained a greater measure of recognition with his smoldering portrayal of one of Isabel Archer's (Nicole Kidman) suitors in Jane Campion's 1996 adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady. He then made another strong impression as Demi Moore's rough, tough, and buff training instructor in G.I. Jane (1997) and, the following year, he was one of the few redeeming features of A Perfect Murder, in which he supplied sexy menace (as well as his own art work) as Gwyneth Paltrow's murderous artist lover. He allowed his softer side to come through in Tony Goldwyn's acclaimed A Walk on the Moon (1999), which cast him as the hippie lover of a dissatisfied housewife (Diane Lane) in Woodstock-era upstate New York. His more romantic side was again in evidence in the romantic drama 28 Days (2000), in which he played recovering party girl Sandra Bullock's rehab honey. Replacing Irish actor Stuart Townsend in the role of Aragorn shortly after production had begun on director Peter Jackson's eagerly anticipated film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Mortensen secured a strong screen presence through 2003, with the release of the trilogy's final installment, The Return of the King. In 2004, he proved that he could carry a film on his own when he starred as Wild West adventurer Frank T. Hopkins in the horse-racing period film Hidalgo. In 2005, the actor won critical raves when he headlined the visceral David Cronenberg crime thriller A History of Violence, vis-a-vis Ed Harris and William Hurt; as Tom Stall, a seemingly open-faced small-town Hoosier whose dark and brutal past comes to light during a diner robbery, Mortensen lent the film a great deal of momentum and held audiences rapt. History received two Academy Award nominations, though Mortensen failed to net one for Best Actor.Mortensen returned to period adventures in 2006 when he played the titular solider-turned-mercenary in Agustín Díaz Yanes' Spanish-language film Alatriste, set during Spain's 16th century imperial wars. In 2007 Mortensen teamed up for a second time with David Cornenberg, playing a Russian mob enforcer in Eastern Promises. His impressive work in the film garnered him strong reviews as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Unfortunately for Mortensen, that year brought some stiff competition in the form of Daniel Day Lewis, who ultimately took home the award for his powerful performance in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. A grim trek through a post-apocalyptic wasteland followed when Mortensen took the lead in John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2009), and in 2011 the actor continued his collaboration with Canadian auteur Cronenberg by playing none other than legendary psychologist Sigmund Freud (opposite Michael Fassbender's Carl Jung) in A Dangerous Method.

Trivia: Naomi Watts had already been a working actress for over a decade when she earned notice as a promising newcomer in David Lynch's Cannes Film Festival prizewinner Mulholland Drive (2001).Born September 28th, 1968, Watts began acting in her teens, landing her first film role in For Love Alone (1986). Watts subsequently appeared with future Hollywood headliners Nicole Kidman and Thandie Newton in John Duigan's disarming teen romance Flirting (1991). Watts's next film with Duigan, Wide Sargasso Sea (1992), was not so well received. After her first taste of Hollywood with Joe Dante's schlock movie homage Matinee (1992), Watts nabbed a starring role as Jimmy Smits's disturbed student in George Miller's little seen courtroom drama Gross Misconduct (1993). Watts then starred as Jet Girl to Lori Petty's Tank Girl (1995), but the science fiction fantasy suffered an ignominious box office fate. After a series of TV movies and thrillers, including Sleepwalkers (1997) and Children of the Corn IV (1996), Watts appeared in Marshall Herskovitz's high-toned Venetian courtesan costumer Dangerous Beauty (1998) and successful TV docudrama The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer (1999). Watts's breakthrough finally arrived when David Lynch cast her in his ABC pilot Mulholland Drive. Though ABC canceled the project in 1999 after Lynch turned in a typically mood-drenched work, StudioCanal financed its transformation into a feature that debuted to acclaim at Cannes in 2001. A Los Angeles dreamscape akin to Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive featured Watts as the blonde half of a female duo caught in a mystery of shifting identities. Drawing attention for her not-for-network TV love scene with co-star Laura Harring, Watts also earned praise as a rising "new" actress.Though ignored for an Oscar nomination, Watts's tour-de-force dual performance earned her numerous accolades and critics' awards, igniting her career. Working steadily in the wake of Mulholland Drive, Watts scored a box-office as well as critical success a year later with The Ring (2002), the Hollywood remake of the Japanese horror blockbuster. Starring Watts as an intrepid reporter investigating the origins of a lethal videotape, The Ring overcame studio doubts to become a sleeper hit, solidifying Watts's new star status. Watts subsequently donned period dress for the Showtime western The Outsider (2002), and to co-star alongside fellow Aussie Heath Ledger in The Kelly Gang (2003). Balancing her genre work with potentially headier fare guided by notable directors, Watts also appeared with Kate Hudson, Glenn Close and Stockard Channing in the Merchant-Ivory romantic comedy Le Divorce (2003), and won a leading role opposite formidable actors Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro in Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams (2003).In 2004, Watts worked opposite Mark Ruffalo for the independent film We Don't Live Here Anymore, and reteamed with Sean Penn for The Assassination of Richard Nixon. She landed the starring role of Ann Darrow in director Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong (2006), and starred in the 2006 remake of The Painted Veil. Watts was praised for her work as a British midwife who accidentally gets involved in the Russian mafia in director David Cronenberg's psychological thriller Eastern Promises. Watts starred along with Clive Owen in 2009's The International, for which she played the part of an assistant district attorney who participates in a plan to rob a bank, and co-starred alongside Samuel L. Jackson, Annette Benning, and Kerry Washington for the drama Mother and Child. Watts was later cast in Dream House (2011), a thriller starring Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, and worked with Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2011 biopic J. Edgar. In 2012 she played the mother of a family trapped in a catastrophic storm in The Impossible, garnering a Best Actress nomination for her work in the film.

Trivia: Alongside frequent collaborator Mathieu Kassovitz, Vincent Cassel emerged in the mid-1990s as one of France's most arresting and exciting new actors. Macho, hard-eyed, and appearing to be in constant preparation for a fight, Cassel embodied a kind of crude masculinity that recalled the likes of Jean-Paul Belmondo and served as a potent onscreen manifestation of the ever-tightening cultural tensions at work in late 20th century France. However, it is a testament to Cassel's talent that his onscreen persona has never verged into caricature, and thanks to his charisma and versatility, he has been able to work in films ranging from grim urban dramas to light romantic comedies.The son of celebrated actor Jean-Pierre Cassel, who made a career out of playing seductive bourgeois men, Cassel was born in Paris' Montmartre district on November 23, 1966. At the age of 17 he went to circus school and spent the next few years generally avoiding the acting scene, due in part to the fact that both his parents (his mother is a journalist) didn't want him to go into the movie business. Cassel was eventually sucked into films in 1991, when he landed a small role in Philippe de Broca's Les Clés du paradis. Two years later he enjoyed his first collaboration with Kassovitz in Metisse, an urban romantic comedy that cast Cassel as Kassovitz's older brother, a tough Jewish boxer.Cassel again stepped in front of the camera for Kassovitz in L'Haine (1995), in which he played a rough-hewn Jewish kid roaming the mean streets of Paris in the company of two friends and a gun. The film was a surprise international success, winning a Best Director Award for Kassovitz at Cannes and a number of French Césars. For his part, Cassel received Best Actor and Most Promising Young Actor César nominations for his portrayal of a young man undone both by his own flaws and those of society, something that raised his profile considerably in his native country and abroad. The actor began popping up in such English language productions as Merchant-Ivory's Jefferson in Paris (1995) and as the leading man in a number of French films, including L'Appartement (1996), a romantic comedy in which he starred alongside Romane Bohringer, Jean-Philippe Ecoffey, and Monica Bellucci. Cassel and Bellucci would continue to collaborate onscreen (in such films as Come Mi Vuoi, 1996) and off, marrying in the late 1990s.Cassel's CV grew rapidly as the century drew to a close, with the actor dividing his time between French films and such international productions as Elizabeth (1998), in which he played the mincing Duc d'Anjou, and Jez Butterworth's Birthday Girl (2000), a romantic drama that cast Cassel and Kassovitz as the cousins of an English bank clerk's (Ben Chaplin) Russian mail-order bride (Nicole Kidman). The following year Cassel recieved what was perhaps his biggest stateside exposure to date with the American release of the highly stylized kung-fu-horror-action-costume adventure flick Brotherhood of the Wolf. In 2002 he appeared opposite his wife yet again in the controversial Irreversible. Two years later he was the bad guy in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Twelve. He starred in the thriller Derailed in 2005. In 2007 he teamed up with David Cronenberg for the well-reviewed crime thriller Eastern Promises, and he would go on to a huge critical success playing the demanding ballet troupe leader in Black Swan. In 2011 he would again work with Cronenberg in the historical drama A Dangerous Method.

Trivia: A musical prodigy, East Prussian-born Armin Mueller-Stahl was a noted concert violinist while still in his teens. Mueller-Stahl turned to film acting in East Berlin in 1950, later launching a 25-year stint as a repertory performer at Theater aum Schiffbaurdamm. The winner of the GDR State Prize for his film work, Mueller-Stahl became persona non grata with the communist regime in 1977, due to his activism in protesting government suppression of performing artists. He relocated to the West in 1980, where he recouped his film stardom in such productions as Fassbinder's Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982) and Agnieszka Holland's Angry Harvest (1985), winning the Montreal Festival "Best Actor" prize for his performance in the latter. Most American viewers first became aware of Mueller-Stahl through his portrayal of Russian general Samanov in the controversial miniseries Amerika (1987). He then gained perhaps his greatest recognition to date by U.S. film fans for two radically different characterizations: aging Nazi war criminal Mike Laszlo in Costa-Gavras' The Music Box (1989) and Jewish grandpa Sam Krischinsky in Barry Levinson's Avalon (1990). He spent the rest of the decade working steadily in Hollywood and abroad, appearing in such films as Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth (1991), The X-Files (1998), and Jakob the Liar (1999). In 1996, he earned particular acclaim and a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his portrayal of pianist David Helfgott's domineering father in Scott Hicks' Shine.He appeared in 2000's Mission to Mars, and followed that up the next year in The Long Run. He was away from screens for three years, reappearing in Bustin' Bonaparte and The Dust Factory, before landing the role of the scary patriarch of a crime family in David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. He appeared in the highly-successful Dan Brown adaptation Angels & Demons.

Trivia: Well respected in the stage world for her frequent work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theater, Irish actress Sinéad Cusack has also made quite an impression in the world of cinema. If her Shakespearian past has followed her from stage to screen with such efforts as Twelfth Night, the classically trained actress has also branched out with roles in such diverse features as Hoffman (1970), Waterland (1992), and Stealing Beauty (1996). Though Cusack spent her early years aspiring to sainthood in convent school, her carefree, attention-getting nature instead led her to the spotlight. When Cusack was 11, her father, Cyril, cast his young daughter in an Olympia Theater production of The Trial; although she wasn't thrilled with the prospect of acting early on, she kept gravitating back toward the stage. It was during her college years that Cusack became a fixture of Dublin's Abbey Theater, and a move to London found her covering for a pregnant Judi Dench in a 1975 production of London Assurance. Cusack credits her subsequent stint at the Royal Shakespeare Company with teaching her everything she knows as an actress. In 1960, Cusack made her feature debut in director Clive Donner's Alfred the Great, and though numerous roles were offered to her in the years that followed, the actress chose her film roles carefully, opting to concentrate on her stage work. Shakespearian roles in such Royal Court productions as Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice balanced numerous small-screen efforts including Notorious Woman (1974) and Quiller (1975). In 1984, Cusack cemented her reputation when she made her Broadway debut in Much Ado About Nothing, and she also made quite an impression with her concurrent performance as Roxanne in the Broadway production of Cyrano de Bergerac (the two productions played in repertory at the George Gershwin Theatre); in 1985, a performance of the latter play was taped for television broadcast. A return to London found Cusack taking the stage with her father and sisters Sorcha and Niamh for a production of, appropriately enough, The Three Sisters. In the late 1980s and early '90s, Cusack became a more familiar face to movie lovers thanks to roles in Waterland (opposite real-life husband Jeremy Irons), Sparrow (1993), and Uncovered (1994). After once again joining husband Irons onscreen with Stealing Beauty, Cusack was directed by him in the 1997 U.K. television drama Mirad. In 2000, Cusack got laughs with her role as a meddlesome mother who enrolls in college to keep an eye on her son in My Mother Frank, and after a role in the quirky drama I Capture the Castle in 2003, she made a trip back to the small screen with the television drama Winter Solstice.

Trivia: Licensed as a pilot, frequently flying out of Van Nuys, CA; originally planned to join the Royal Air Force. Attended prep school with eventual Spooks costar Rupert Penry-Jones. Emerged on the London stage when cast as Sky in Mamma Mia! and in the leading role of Andrew Lloyd Webber's production of Bombay Dreams. Created and coproduced RED, a dance show celebrating various movements and their influences on and from India.

Trivia: Adept at portraying characters of varying ethnicity, character actress Mina E. Mina first began essaying Hollywood roles in the early '80s and seemed adept on both the big and small screens. At first, Mina devoted a great deal of time to made-for-television pictures, such as the pilot for the series Cagney & Lacey and the 1990 superhero outing The Death of the Incredible Hulk, starring Bill Bixby. Mina's enlistment by Clint Eastwood to portray Muddy Chandler in his 1992 Best Picture winner, the Western Unforgiven, suggested a turn toward more prestigious A-list material, but she spent the remainder of the 1990s in mostly forgettable fare, before returning to box-office blockbusters with plum roles in the Vin Diesel action-fantasy The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) and the David Cronenberg crime saga Eastern Promises.

Trivia: Quintessentially British character actor Donald Sumpter tackled a host of roles in his native Britain before breaking through to international acclaim. He landed guest parts (as different characters) on the U.K. cult fantasy series Doctor Who, then segued to features throughout the 1970s, '80s, and '90s in such pictures as Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), and Richard III (1995). Sumpter's popularity increased substantially in the mid- to late 2000s when he landed pivotal supporting roles in two major features: Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener (2005) and David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises (2007).

Trivia: Has Turkish Cypriot roots. Other than English also speaks Turkish and Arabic. An injury caused him to give up boxing. Runs nightclubs and restaurants. Is the owner, chairman, and coach of Greenwich Boxing Football Club. Owns Eltham Boxing Gym.

Trivia: Made her West End debut in Serious Monkey in 1987. Played Mother Teresa in UK premiere of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot in 2008. Voiced Stella in the BBC Radio 4's Torchwood: The Dead Line in 2009.

Trivia: Like Tobe Hooper and George Romero, David Cronenberg sprang into public consciousness with a series of low-budget horror films that shocked and surprised audiences for their sheer audacity and intelligence. Unlike the former two filmmakers, Cronenberg has been able to avoid being pigeonholed into a single restrictive genre category. His works, which consistently explore the same themes, have the mark of a true auteur in the strictest sense of the word. Cronenberg's films have the unnerving ability to delve into society's collective unconscious and dredge up all of the perverse, suppressed desires of modern life. His world features grotesque deformities, hallucinatory couplings, and carnality unhinged from its corporeal moorings.Born on March 15, 1943, in Toronto, Canada, Cronenberg was the son of a freelance journalist and a piano teacher. He was raised in a nurturing middle class family and wrote constantly as a child, showing a strong interest in science, particularly in botany and lepidopterology (the study of moths). In 1963, he entered the University of Toronto as an Honors Science student, though he quickly grew disenchanted and within a year switched to the Honors English Language and Literature program. During this time, Cronenberg was profoundly impressed by Winter Kept Us Warm (1966) by classmate David Secter. Though previously not especially interested in film, this student work piqued his interest, and soon he was hanging out at film camera rental houses where he taught himself the ins and outs of filmmaking. He made two no-budget 16mm films (Transfer and From the Drain), and -- inspired by the underground film scene in New York -- he founded the Toronto Film Co-op with Iain Ewing and Ivan Reitman. After a year traveling in Europe, Cronenberg returned to Canada and graduated at the top of his class in 1967.After making the avant-garde sci-fi flick Stereo (1969), Cronenberg became one of the first recipients of CFDC (Canadian Film Development Corporation) funding for his follow-up, Crimes of the Future (also 1969), a dark, surreal experimental exploration of sexuality. After these two films, Cronenberg realized that working in a strictly experimental venue was ultimately a dead end -- he wanted to broaden his audience.With Reitman as the producer, Cronenberg made his feature debut with the low-budget horror flick Shivers (1975). Recalling Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Shivers gleefully presents the audience with phallus-like parasites that turn an apartment full of well-to-do professionals into a throng of sex-mad maniacs. Shivers sharply divided critics. Cronenberg made two more films with direct or indirect funding from the CFDC -- Rabid (1977) and The Brood (1979). Both of these films, along with Shivers, form a rough trilogy of sorts about physical evolutions of the body bringing civilization to its knees. In Rabid, featuring Ivory Pure model-turned-porn star Marilyn Chambers as Typhoid Mary, a virulent strain of rabies that reduces victims to foaming murderous animals devastates the city of Montreal. In The Brood, a mother manifests her angers as bloodthirsty, hideously misshapen children.Cronenberg's breakthrough film was his 1981 box office hit Scanners. Featuring an overtly sci-fi story line, a sinister performance by Michael Ironside, and an infamous exploding head scene, the film established Cronenberg's name beyond the exploitation house and drive-in audiences. Two years later, Cronenberg followed this up with his masterful Videodrome. Told in a Burroughs-esque fractured stream of consciousness, the film concerns Renn, a sleazy cable TV operator, who discovers that the mysterious snuff cable he happened upon gives the viewers brain tumors. Humans and media hardware merge in unexpected, strangely sexual ways: video tapes throb like organs, and a tape is slotted into a vagina like gash in a human abdomen. Though Videodrome's awe of video may seem dated, the film's basic questioning of technology seems perhaps more relevant today than it did when it first premiered. After mining his own personal nightmare, Cronenberg opted for comparatively lighter fare and directed The Dead Zone (1983), adapted from a Stephan King novel. Though this was the first and thus far only script that he did not have a hand in writing, the film's emphasis on off-kilter psychologies and disease bears Cronenberg's unmistakable stamp. Eventually, Cronenberg agreed to remake the 1958 horror classic The Fly (1986). Both a wild gore-fest and a brilliant metaphor for aging, Cronenberg's Fly is a more harrowing and emotionally powerful work than the original. The film also recalled the intensity and intimacy of his early horror works such as The Brood. Consisting of only three main characters and basically one setting, the film obsessively depicts the lead character's slow and gruesome mutation, complete with dropped-off body parts, into a human-fly hybrid. The film proved to a terrific critical and financial success. With his directing reputation cemented, Cronenberg edged away from horror/sci-fi genres and made the chilling character study Dead Ringers (1988). Based on a National Enquirer headline about the real-life case of the Marcus brothers, a pair of fratricidal identical twin gynecologists, the film clinically portrays the duo as their identities slowly disintegrate and merge.Cronenberg followed up Dead Ringers with the decidedly less commercial Naked Lunch (1991). Less an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' classic underground novel than a dizzying meditation on the act of writing, the film features some of Cronenberg's most striking images articulating some of his most familiar themes. Talking cockroaches morph into typewriter-like organisms, women suddenly split open and become men, and typewriters possess flesh-like qualities and evolve into undefined sexual organs. His next work, M. Butterfly (1993), is a restrained account of the bizarre true life case of Rene Gallimard, a French embassy worker who never realized that his long-time Chinese lover was in fact a man.Cronenberg followed M. Butterfly with Crash (1996), his most controversial work to date, based on the profoundly disturbing underground classic by J. D. Ballard. Banned for a time in Britain and rated NC-17 in the U.S., the film is a hypnotic, harrowing journey through a landscape of aberrant sexuality, sterile modernist architecture, emotional blankness, and smashed automobiles. Just as in Ballard's work, Cronenberg takes the familiar cliches of romance and seduction and supplants them with something alien and surreal. James Ballard, the protagonist, engages in an adulterous affair not after a chance meeting, but after a car wreck. The same character penetrates the wound in a severely injured woman's leg instead of using more traditional orifices. Daring and frightening, Crash won a Special Jury Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.For his 1999 film eXistenZ, he wrote his first original script since Videodrome. Inspired by the fugitive life of author Salman Rushdie, whom Cronenberg interviewed for a magazine, the film concerns a game's designer on the run from a band of Luddite terrorists. Cronenberg brilliantly reverses all Blade Runner-like cliches of the coming cyberpunk future by setting the film in a rustic mountain forest where old fish canneries serve as biotech factories. Fans who were left thirsting for more following the innovative cyberpunk exploits of eXistenZ faced an extended dry spell in the following three years, left with little more than an introspective and fascinating six-minute short entitled Camera that proved a study in celluliods relationship with ageing and death. Though his involvement with the planned sequel to Basic Instinct may not quite have been the film fans had hoped for, plans quickly fell through and Cronenberg began to express interest in author Patrick McGrath's book Spider. A haunting study in mental decay, the material seemed ideally suited to Cronenberg's dark outlook, and it wasn't long before McGrath was adapting his novel into a screenplay for the eager director. Recieving generally high marks from critics upon its limited stateside release in early 2003, the film nevertheless proved a hard sell due to its brooding and deliberate pacing.In the years that followed, Cronenberg moved into genres he hadn't yet charted - with tremendous critical and commercial success across the board. This exploration began in 2005 with A History of Violence - a tough crime thriller with Viggo Mortensen as a man living an unassuming life in Central Indiana, whose dark criminal past explosively catches up with him. Two years later, Cronenberg and Mortensen reunited for the arthouse hit Eastern Promises (2007), with Mortensen as a Russian mafia kingpin living and operating in London; it received glowing reviews and earned considerable box office. Then, in 2011, Cronenberg emerged with a picture in yet another genre: historical drama. His A Dangerous Method co-starred Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley in the tale of psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein and her complex relationships with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. In 2012 he adapted Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis, casting Robert Pattinson as a wealthy young New Yorker having a very hard time getting across town.