Elijah Wood has had it for the moment with big-budget movies, complicated costumes and Hobbit feet. After four years as Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings movies he’s taking a decidedly different
turn in his career and audiences will be seeing him in small gritty indie films in the coming months.
He already played the cool murderous mute in Sin City, and is doing a voice in the upcoming animated movie Happy Feet. But in September and October you’ll have to look in art houses to find his two very different takes of an American in foreign territory–first as a journalist-turned-street thug in Green Street Hooligans and as an introverted young man trying to find his Jewish roots in a small Ukranian town in Everything is Illuminated.
Dressed in a striped shirt with a black t-shirt underneath, jeans and thick black sideburns, 24-year-old Wood says he’s ready to grow up in his movie roles.
“What I’m looking for is just roles that will continue to sort of build me as an adult,” said the wide-eyed guy with the big blue eyes (which are for real). “I think that I’m still perceived a lot younger than I am. So I think that would be the one thing that I’d be looking for the most, having them more adult in nature and a bit older.”
In Hooligans, Wood plays a journalism student at Harvard who gets kicked out and then visits his sister in London. He meets a guy involved in a “firm,” which is in actuality a gang connected to a soccer (football) team that often get into violent street fights.
“I was an American who’s not really familiar with that world, having never been to a proper football match and kind of experiencing those things with the guys for the first time, so it was kind of perfect because it was very much setup for what my character has to go through,” Wood said. His co-star is Nicholas Nickleby star Charlie Hunnam, who takes on the most evil and gritty role of his career, too.
“I didn’t get hurt,” Wood said, but he thinks he can handle himself well in a fight. “Actually, we had pretty intensive training and choreography for the fighting. I did about three weeks of training with Pat Johnson who was our choreographer before I went out to London and then consequently during those two weeks of rehearsals we all trained together and choreographed the fights. So it was a lot of fun. It was fun to be trained in fighting and learn street fighting moves. It was very male and masculine.”
In Illuminated, the actor is a guy looking for his family roots, and director/actor Liev Schreiber took the project on as a personal story. “I haven’t made that journey, it is something that I’d like to do. I know that I do have family in Eastern Europe which is interesting to me,” Wood said. “It’s interesting because the film, Illuminated came at a time in my life when I was kind of asking those questions and kind of wondering about my heritage when this movie came along.”
Wood left home at 18 to live in New Zealand for nearly two years, making the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and although he values the experience and fame he’s had in the movies, he doesn’t mind working on smaller projects like Illuminated which required him to spend a lot of time with a dog, old man and crazy driver as they trek through the countryside.
“Working with Liev as a first-time director was wonderful, because he is an actor first,” Wood said. “This movie really relies on the characters and it relies on the performance of these characters because it is a character driven film. So to have an actor at that heart of that, at the helm was really helpful.”
Schreiber said, “Elijah is amazing and he grew up making movies. So he has an incredible vocabulary of film. He knows what’s going on always. He’s very, very aware of the camera marks, the needs of the day, the schedule. He’s very, very proficient and he’s very, very professional. That was a bonus because I had to spend so much time with the other actors.”
Both Hooligans and Illuminated were shot in Europe. While Wood doesn’t have much of a problem fitting in, becoming part of a British street gang took some work for the short and skinny actor. Hunnam said director Lexi Alexander purposely kept Wood separated until the very last minute. “He was definitely the odd man out when he arrived,” said Hunnam. “Lexi is just very smart the way that she approaches directing especially this being her first feature. This is the type of thing that she would in lieu of being on the set and actually giving you direction. She’s one of the very rare directors, and as an actor it’s beautiful and she doesn’t come with a fully recognized, preconceived idea of what the scene should be. She’s much more excited to see what you’re going to come up with. It’s very rare that a director will kind of empower you in that way”
Wood fit in quickly but was treated more like a rock star than an indie actor. Hunnam recalled, “He’s obviously very, very famous and it was the height of it. I think that the last movie had just come out. But he very, very quickly integrated himself into the group and there was a lot of fun to be had. I mean, those guys continued to go out all the way through production and we’re going out and having wild nights and stuff. I can’t do that.”
For Wood, he’s planning on being part of another ensemble film, directed by Emilio Estevez, called Bobby. “It’s about the day Bobby Kennedy was shot at The Ambassador Hotel. So it’s sort of about a cross section of all these different people’s lives, different stories of days in the life of different people at The Ambassador and it ends with that tragedy to give insight into that experience, but also what people were going through at that time in our history, at the hotel itself.”
And, he’s working on a record label and hopes to produce different kinds of music, now that he has the money, time and notoriety. And then, he plans to grow up.
Everything is Illuminated and Green Street Hooligans both open limitedly Sept. 16.
