http://theedge.bostonherald.com/movieNews/view.bg?articleid=103037
By Stephen Schaefer Sunday, September 18, 2005 - Updated: Sep 19, 2005 02:00 PM EST
In ``Everything Is Illuminated'' (opening Friday), Elijah Wood faces a perilous journey, but it's a long way from Frodo's in ``The Lord of the Rings.'' Wood's bespectacled Jonathan, a neurotic New Yorker and self-described collector, treks not to Middle Earth but to the mysterious Ukraine, where no one speaks English and tourists rarely show. Here life couldn't be more different or chaotic than Jonathan's orderly existence. ``He is an odd character, and I love that about him,'' Wood said during a one-on-one interview with the Herald. ``He doesn't really fit in with the context of the modern world. He's very much in his own world, obsessed with family, obsessed with the past and obsessed with collecting. The Ukraine trip is to find the woman that he believes saved his grandfather during the (second world) war.''
A comedy that takes a serious turn, ``Everything Is Illuminated'' is Wood's latest offbeat character in an independent film. He did the quirky ``Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,'' and then came Kevin, the psychotic serial killer who murdered women and ate them as a religious rite in Frank Miller's ``Sin City.'' ``I'm certainly open to playing a regular guy,'' Wood said. ``Just as an actor, and especially after `Lord of the Rings,' my interests are to play things that are very different from anything that I've played before, both in terms of how people would perceive me and also to continue to challenge myself. I guess that's probably why the characters are so different and so odd, some of them, and why I'm more fascinated by that rather than what would be relatively normal.'' Odd onscreen, normal off. Wood, 24, began acting at 8. But for someone who was called the greatest child actor of his generation, he's made the transformation to adulthood without the horror stories that are often a sidebar to early celebrity. ``I held everything in perspective,'' he said. ``It's funny - like, I remember when the first `Lord of the Rings' came out, and there were massive posters everywhere that were always my face. People, friends and journalists and so on would always ask, `What's that like? Your face is everywhere. That must be weird.' And it's not because it's a character. It's Frodo. It's kept in that place. And then something like (attending) the Oscars was a treat, but I guess that it's hard to explain how I have that perspective beyond the fact that I have an amazing mother that constantly kept me grounded.
"She raised me in the midst of the industry to be the best human being that I can be, and her focus was always on raising me to be a good human being. Her interest was to support me as an actor, but she gave me the tools to deal with everything that I had to deal with and never allowed me to define myself by what I do. She was amazing in that way.''