The Australian actor Travis Fimmel, formerly known as Ragnar Lothbrok, eighth-century Viking slaughterer-hero, on the History Channel series “Vikings,” can, as of this month, be found navigating the virgin planet Kepler-22B, on HBO Max. In the new Ridley Scott-produced series, “Raised by Wolves,” Fimmel plays Marcus, a burly, bearded guy with a mullet, a knightly white surcoat, and a dark past, living among androids and animosity. Despite this, he retains a mellow vibe; so does Fimmel. On a recent Saturday, he was relaxing at his cattle ranch, north of Los Angeles. He wore a plaid shirt and a baseball cap; his beard was shaggy. “I’ve been busy doing a lot of fencing”—i.e., putting up fences—“while I’ve got this time off because of Covid, and planting a lot of trees,” he said. “Fruitless mulberry, because they’re great shade trees. Peppercorn, because they’re so drought-tolerant. Eucalyptus, because I’m trying to make everything as Australian as I can.” He hasn’t minded the time off. “I’d much rather be doing this sort of stuff than putting on makeup and playing make-believe,” he said.
Fimmel, forty-one, grew up in southeastern Australia, on his family’s farm. “We had dairy cattle, beef, and crops,” he said. He’d planned to farm “always,” but “then there was a year in my life, when I was eighteen, where I was, like, I don’t want to be on the farm.” (Ragnar Lothbrok had a similar impulse.) He ventured to London and L.A., bartending (“Working in bars, living above bars—it was kind of the funnest time”); modelling Calvin Klein underwear, on a traffic-stopping billboard in London (“His presence was jaw-dropping,” Klein has said); and acting. “I had no ambition to do it,” Fimmel said. “I still don’t.” Performing live makes him uncomfortable. “I cannot audition to save my life,” he said. “I hate it. I could never be in a play, onstage. I’d break down and cry.”
Onscreen, he makes do. He’s played Tarzan, in the series “Tarzan”; Sir Anduin Lothar, knight champion of Azeroth, in the video-game-inspired “Warcraft”; and Ragnar, who is both assertive and sensitive—his best friend is a monk he captured. Fimmel’s performance in “Vikings” caught the eye of Daniel Day-Lewis, whose wife, the director Rebecca Miller, cast Fimmel in her 2015 film, “Maggie’s Plan.” In it, he plays an earnest Brooklyn pickle-maker in a knit hat, opposite Greta Gerwig and Ethan Hawke. He brings to all his roles a startling lack of neurosis. On “Raised by Wolves,” the aesthetic is a little “Blade Runner,” a little “Westworld,” a little White House Christmas decorations, and people act accordingly—but, whenever Fimmel appears, the series enters a realm of recognizable human behavior, even amid dialogue like “The necromancer took him.”
“It’s the same as any sort of period,” Fimmel said, of life in the year 2159 on Kepler-22B. “It’s just all about relationships. People trying to get loved or find their place in the world.” In Marcus’s first scene, he defuses tension between his clan, the Mithraic, who have come to the new planet after killing Earth’s atheists, and Mother, an atheist android, whose human children came to the planet as embryos. “Wait. Please. Apologies,” Marcus begins, warmly. He’s picked up a stalk. “I see that you have been farming. A lot.” Soon, he’s at her table, slurping soup. Later, among solemn Mithraic children in a spaceship, he initiates a galumphing round of duck-duck-goose.
On his ranch, Fimmel said, “I’ve got a few longhorn cattle, horses, chickens, an Englishman who’s staying here—he’s up there, walking around.” He waved. “I’ve got a couple of emus, just because they’re Australian. They’re not the sharpest bird in the aviary. But they’re always intrigued by whatever’s going on. They’re quirky, and they can run like thirty-five miles an hour.” He headed toward a fence; two emus stood atop a hill. “Come on, hey!” he yelled, whistling. The emus snapped to attention and raced over, bobbing at speed. They cocked their fuzzy heads at him, then ate from his hand. “Look at their feet—they’re like dinosaurs,” he said. Two brown horses approached, and he fed them, too.
Fimmel rides horses onscreen and off. In “Vikings,” Ragnar executed a daring escape on a white one; while shooting “Warcraft,” Fimmel was thrown from a spooked horse; he also has up-in-the-air plans to play Wyatt Earp and to star in a spaghetti Western. Beyond that, professionally, “I’m meant to go back to do a second season of, um, spaceships,” he said. Meanwhile: the ranch. “I wanted to get kangaroos,” he said. They’re illegal to keep as pets in California, but about this, too, he is serene. “If someone were to let one free around me, I’d rescue it,” he said. ♦
