By EMILY CHRISTIANSON Special To The Daily Press
Lord of the Rings memorabilia, bits of paper, photographs … perhaps Elijah Wood needs to take up scrap booking.
“It’s rubbish how poorly organized I am, but I keep like the tiniest pieces of paper that have some type of relevance to an experience,” said the 24-year-old.
Best-known for his role as Frodo, he even admits to having boxes and boxes of the trilogy collectibles.
“I basically just said, ‘Listen, send everything. I want everything. I don’t care if it’s underwear. If it’s got something to do with Lord of the Rings, I want it,’ because when am I going to have an opportunity again to be a part of something that has this kind of merchandise?” Wood asked.
Wood’s tendencies aren’t a far cry from his “Everything is Illuminated” character Jonathan, a quirky young American obsessed with his Eastern European heritage. Jonathan, a more organized collector, carries Zip Lock bags for preserving everything from family heirlooms to hand soap.
“I’m not nearly as socially awkward or inept as he is,” insists the actor who hails from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “I don’t think I am, am I?”
Not compared to some of his fans. “I had a woman breakdown and cry when she met me, which was difficult to deal with because immediately when someone starts to cry, you want to comfort them, you know,” he said. “Poor thing. I comforted her. I tried to make her feel better.”
Wood doesn’t complain about answering to Frodo, the “Elijah marry me” signs, or even the gay Web sites.
“There is one called elijahwoodis-veryverygay, which is actually a personal favorite of mine, it’s absolutely hilarious,” he told Conan O’Brien. “It’s this kind of joke Web site that maintains that they have proof that I am very, very gay in various photographs … photographic evidence (of me) holding hands with a male.”
He admits that another offered a doctored photo of him and Dominic Monaghan “making sweet love. If you did-n’t know any better, it kinda looks real.”
He later added: “These people have a lot of time on their hands and my hat’s off (to them) because it’s very good work.”
Wood still maintains a close relationship with his Rings costars and even considered a King Kong cameo with his fellow hobbits.
“I think early on we had conceived of maybe getting the hobbits out there,” he said recently during a press conference at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons. “Maybe Dom, (Billy Boyd) and myself get stomped on or something or maybe even dressed as hobbits way in the background or something. We never got to do it because Dom was super busy on Lost … and we couldn’t coordinate schedules to do it.”
The child actor, who shot to super-stardom with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, started in commercials and television before landing minor parts in movies like Back to the Future Part II and Internal Affairs. Bigger roles were soon to follow such as Avalon, Forever Young and The Good Son.
He confesses that after Rings “anything remotely large in scale was the last thing I wanted to do.” So he opted for projects like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Everything is Illuminated and Green Street Hooligans.
In Hooligans, which opened in theaters Sept. 9, Wood plays Matt Buckner, an expelled Harvard journalism student living in London who quickly gets drawn into the camaraderie and violence of the football mob.
The 5-foot-6-inch actor, who went through intense training and choreography for the fight scenes, now maintains that “I could handle myself pretty well (in a fight).”
Wood’s new record label also is keeping him busy. The eclectic music lover, who plans to sign friends at first, wants to put out music that he loves and thinks people should hear.
Any chance he’ll sign himself to the label?
“I don’t have a great love for bands with actors in them,” he tells British magazine Q. “Me prancing around on stage? That’s not going to happen.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 16, 2005. Read the original PDF.