One of the big stories in Spanish politics in recent years has been the emergence and growth of far-right party Vox. In January, they agreed to vote with PP and Cs to invest a new government in Andalusia. Meanwhile, just last month, they won their first seats in the Spanish Congress: 24 of them, to be exact.

During voting in April's general election, the party posted an image on its official Twitter feed showing Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings, who they edited to represent Vox and Spain, charging towards an enemy, sword drawn. That enemy, the massed hordes of Mordor in the original, for Vox was edited to include symbols representing the LGBTQ community, feminism, the Catalan independence movement, anti-fascism, republicanism, anarchism, socialism, communism and three media outlets (El País, Cadena SER and La Sexta).

Now, the actor who played Aragorn in Peter Jackson's film trilogy, Viggo Mortensen, has written a letter to the newspaper El País in which he says that you'd have to be "pretty ignorant" to think it a good idea to use the image of Tolkien's character to promote a "xenophobic, far-right party like Vox". Firstly, he thinks it "absurd" to link him to the "ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist" party as an actor "interested in the rich variety of cultures and languages that exist in Spain and the world". Secondly, he finds it "even more ridiculous" to use the character of Aragorn in particular, "a multilingual statesman who advocates for knowledge and inclusion of the different races, traditions and languages of Middle Earth".

Mortensen himself has dual US-Danish citizenship, grew up in Argentina and Venezuela and speaks several languages fluently. In the 2016 US presidential election, he supported first left-wing senator Bernie Sanders, then Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Since 2009, he has been in a relationship with Catalan actress Ariadna Gil; he is a member of Catalan pro-independence cultural organisation Òmnium and was one of the signatories of the manifesto Let Catalans Vote in the run-up to the 2017 referendum.

Despite Vox's "ineptitude", however, Mortensen writes that it's "no joke". The party came fifth in the general election with over 10% of the popular vote. "We will have to be alert and proactive, like Aragorn," he warns.