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Elijah Wood, the elfin-faced star of the mega-grossing Lord Of The Rings trilogy, reveals why he's travelled from Middle Earth to the mean streets of east London for his latest role as a tooled-up football hooligan
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Maybe it's Elijah Wood who holds the key to the modern Fame dilemma. Maybe Scientists should test his blood and isolate the active ingredient into some kind of anti-celebrity serum. He was ostensibly the lead actor in The Lord Of The Rings, the biggest film franchise of the decade, and his face is plastered over DVD box-sets from Oxford Street to Auckland, and yet he's kept a strange anonymity.
"I'm not in any kind of position comparable to other people Wood confirms, smoking thin cigarettes from behind a well-polished desk in London's Dorchester Hotel. "I have it pretty damn good that I can walk the streets and drive around in LA and in the world, and not be too bothered and still have a semi-normal life.
His eyes, two trembling pale-blue menisci, widen. You believe him. With tousled brown hair, he's Tamagotchi-cute, but so radiantly so, he seems larger than his 5'6". It's obvious why Peter Jackson cast him to embody corrupted innocence as the Ringbearer, Frodo. Unfortunately, people just don't seem to recognise the importance of being earnest, and Wood seems to have befallen the same fate as Mark Hamill/Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. Was it a thankless task? He's not done with earnest yet: “I don’t feel that, no. The thing about Frodo is that he does change. As an actor, it’s a challenge to take him from being a pure soul to literally stripping him of his soul by the end."
It's a good thing that 24-year-old Wood has exited the trilogy with a relatively low-profile and, perhaps, in touch with his dark side. Admirably, he seems to be trying to reinvent himself. "After Lord Of The Rings, the fact that that was so massive and took so much attention, it became so much more important that the work I did after was a great, great contrast." Kevin, the speccy serial killer who ends up pooch-food in Sin City, definitely qualified as a contrast. And now there's Elijah Wood: football hooligan.
"What was fascinating was coming to understand this counter-culture in England that I wasn't at all familiar with and is really unique to this part of the world," says Wood of his new film, Green Street. He plays an American undergrad unfairly kicked out of Harvard who comes to stay with his sister in London. She's married to a Cockney whose younger brother (Charlie Hunnam) runs with the West Ham firms. Initially holding the wet-eared tourist in contempt, the yob decides to take him under his wing.
Wood didn't research the character prior to filming, as he wanted to come to it raw. During rehearsals he went to West Ham games, drank in the Boleyn Tavern outside the ground and met members of the infamous ICF (Inter City Firm) who in return got to faux-glass each other as extras and also acted as security for the film. Did Wood feel uncomfortable hanging around these villains? That's the thing, they're violent in their setting, in the context of the life they lead. But outside of that, they're lovely guys. They weren't particularly intimidating, they weren't particularly violent or angry."
It might be different if he were some random Yank down their boozer, I point out. "Quite possibly, quite possibly. Interestingly enough, I feel more safe in dangerous areas of America than I do in dangerous areas here. It's kinda ridiculous because we have guns and stuff in the States. But here it's kinda sheer brutality. I find that more frightening. It's a slightly unhinged, you could be taken out at any moment thing."
It sounds a touch exaggerated and it does feel like Wood has been seduced by Green Street's sensationalist take on the phenomenon. The film starts out well enough, but loses its head by the end which, considering it was directed by an ex-footie hooligan, isn't a total shock. The actor offers a decent defence for why the film is so adrenalised by violence ("We have to make it attractive, 'cos otherwise we don't understand why these people get involved") but not for why it fails to throw any perspective on it whatsoever.
Still, Wood throws himself in with gusto and deserves respect for an adventurous film choice. Listening to him dissect and anthropologise English football culture is a slightly bizarre experience though. "The thing about football violence is that it's so organised - there are these firms - and the football is almost secondary." He talks about it with a slightly childlike wonder, like he's looking at a specimen in a jar. There's definitely a touch of the geek to him. For starters, he hordes music. The Elijah Wood CD collection, as eulogised by many a journalist, is a modern day wonder, on a par with the Library of Alexandria. His listening recommendations on the afternoon of August 22 are the new Sons & Daughters album, country-bluegrass new boy Langhorne Slim and New York gypsypunks Gogol Bordello.
He explains his musical appetite: "A lot of it has to do with travelling and meeting different people and getting to know people, what they're into." There's definitely an eager, open-minded quality to him -as you'll know if you've seen his films but also something almost naive about it. One incident that stands out in past interviews is when, in the presence of a hack, he is approached by a young fan and asked to say something into her camcorder. You might expect a message for her friends, but instead he flips her some Siddhartha: "There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self." He seems to have a habit of speaking in adages, nuggets of freeze-dried experience. He's surprised when I point this out: "I do?" Is he an idealist, striving for high standards? "To a certain degree, I think I am idealistic. But I also tend to be a bit of a realist as well... I'm an optimistic realist, but I would say I'm optimistic. There's a certain amount of untruth to being purely optimistic. The opposite of that is pessimism and I don't believe in that either- I don't believe in looking at the world or life through those eyes. I prefer to look at things from a realist perspective, always hoping for the best."
There's another aphorism in there, struggling to burst out, but somehow the bricks of wisdom seem a bit too weighted. If he is grasping at big truths, then maybe it's not surprising considering he's been relatively cocooned in showbusiness since he was eight (and, after all, his branch of it relies on being able to convey the flavour of the world). His mother Debbie began putting him in for auditions and he got a part in a Paula Abdul music video, directed by a young David Fincher. "It was full of kids pretending to be adults and I was an exec in a suit, heartbroken over a girl. I broke a pencil or something."
Wood and his family (he has an elder brother, Zach, and a young sister, Hannah) moved to Los Angeles shortly afterwards, where he avoided traditional kid-star pitfalls by not starring in any films solely for children -a part in the then-feted Barry Levinson's Avalon (1990) was a good start. He's quick to defend his mum from any charges of pushiness, let alone Culkin-style exploitation. "No, no, God, no. In fact there were many times when she threatened to take me out of it. It was hard for her because as a mother with a son in the industry at the age I was, automatically people see her as being a stage mother." Wood's parents divorced in 1996 - contact with his father has been apparently patchy since-and his fanfare to the world of adult acting came with Ang Lee's superlative The Ice Storm in 1997. He's kept a steady flow of work up, tied up with the Tolkien trilogy in his early twenties. He seems assiduously down-to-earth (even "boring" in his own words) avoiding the LA celebrity circuit and currently dating an ordinary civilian who "works in music". They cope with his fame and the attention it brings as best as they can "I don't think it's cool and she doesn't think it's cool. It's not a really bad thing but it's not a point of raciness either by any means." He's concerned that his elfin looks restrict parts available to him, but he's thankful he's carried on working at all.
A prestigious lead in the adaptation is Everything Is Illuminated is next, as a Jewish American travelling across the Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Director Liev Schreiber recently called his young co-star "really very weird"; perhaps he's hit on something, submerged beneath Wood's sweet exterior, the wunderklnd career, the serene aphorising. All of Wood's best roles have had a little twin of perversity: the germphobic product of family dysfunction in The Ice Storm, the pervy lab technician in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Frodo trying to go cold-turkey on the Ring. Oh, and that psycho who feeds someone their own hand in Sin City. You get the feeling that Wood is only just uncovering who he really is and that the acting will mature. So what does he think of Schreiber's remark? "I kinda take it as compliment. And I took it as a compliment back then. I don't know specifically what he's referring to. But weird is good." Let us know more, Elijah...
Green Street is released on September 9.