Trivia / The Vikings

• Awesome, Dear Boy: Kirk Douglas produced the film to fulfill his childhood dream of playing a Viking.
• California Doubling: The castle of La Roche Goyon, better known as Fort la Latte, which is situated in Brittany, France, was used as Aella's Northumbrian castle.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Kirk Douglas was one month older than Ernest Borgnine and played the latter's son. Borgnine sporting a beard and relatively long hair and Douglas being clean-shaven and short-haired helped sell the difference.
  • Furthermore the character of Hasting (renamed "Einar" in the film) in the Edison Marshall novel, is stated to be two years older than Ogier (renamed "Eric" in the film).
  • Eric is supposed to be around 20. Tony Curtis was 33 at the time.
  • In the book, Morgana is stated to be fifteen, five years younger than Ogier/Eric when they first meet (women tended to marry around that age in The Middle Ages). Janet Leigh was 31.
  • In the book, Egbert was thirty when Ogier was twenty. In the film he is played by the forty-one year old James Donald.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Kirk Douglas offered all the male members of the cast a prize for the best beard, to be grown before arriving on location. All turned up with huge beards, only to find Douglas clean-shaven.
• Fake Nationality:
  • Outside of the Danish Per Buckhoj as Bjorn, none of the Vikings in the film are played by actual Scandinavians. Most of the actors are actually Americans.
  • American Janet Leigh as the Welsh Morgana.
  • Frank Thring was Australian and played the English (Northumbrian) Aella.
  • The Scottish James Donald as the English Lord Egbert, who was based off King Ecgberht of Northumbria.
  • Almut Berg was German and played the cheating Scandinavian woman.
• Hey, It's That Place!: Aella's castle is the coastal castle Fort la Latte, or Castle of the Rock Goyon, in the Côtes d'Armor department of France. It was previously used for 1931's Le parfum de la dame en noir, then would go one to be used for The Three Musketeers (1961), Lancelot du Lac (1970), the series L'Épervier and another adaptation of The Three Musketeers, the 2023 French one (Part II: Milady more precisely).
• No Stunt Double: Stuntmen had practiced for weeks for the oar walking scenes. Kirk Douglas told director Richard Fleischer that he could do it and did several times. At one point when he did fall in the icy water he calmly swam over to the camera boat and asked if they had gotten good shots. He then swam back to the Viking longboat. Fleischer noted they were watching and filming an activity that had not been done in 1000 years.
• Produced by Cast Member: Kirk Douglas was the main producer of the film via his company, Bryna Productions.
• Production Posse: Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis played in Spartacus two years later. Bryna Productions (Kirk's company) produced both The Vikings and Spartacus.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh were married since 1952.
  • Their first, daughter 2 year old Kelly Curtis (the older sister of Jamie Lee), played a little girl at the village of the Vikings. She's the last known surviving cast member.
• Throw It In!: During the Viking Funeral scene, a single archer fires a flaming arrow, which hits the mast nearly dead center, followed by others. This was an accident, as one of the archers hired for the scene fired before he was supposed to. The director decided to keep it when he saw how good it looked.
• What Could Have Been: As the special feature on the DVD shows, before deciding on Eric for the renaming of Ogier the Dane, the character would have been called Oric. Similarly, Kirk Douglas' character would have been called Hastings instead of Einar, of course it is ambiguous if this is truly an Adaptational Name Change or merely a mispelling of the character's original name since even Edison Marshall once mispelled it as such.

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