How Elijah Wood went the extra mile to audition for The Lord of the Rings

Between Back to the Future II and Sin City, we’ve had the pleasure of seeing Elijah Wood grow up on our screens over the years. But none of his roles are as iconic portrayal as his portrayal of Frodo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s now been almost two decades since The Fellowship of the Ring premiered, and the movies are firmly enshrined in the pop culture hall of fame.

During a GQ retrospective interview, Wood gave an interesting anecdote about how he went the extra mile to show director Peter Jackson how eager he was to portray the Ring-bearer. “I sat in an office, by myself, for two hours and read the script for The Fellowship of the Ring,” he said. “I’ll never forget that. Driving home, I was so immersed in the world. It was so palpable and lifelike. It really came to life off the page.”

However, actually getting the role would take a lot more effort. Given the status of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy as one of, if not the greatest fantasy series ever written, there were a lot of actors showing interest. Wood knew he had to create something that would catch Jackson’s attention, so he took it upon himself to put together an audition tape:

"I went to a vocal coach for the dialect and enlisted some friends, including George Huang, who is a writer and filmmaker. We went out to the woods in Griffith Park and shot two of the audition sequences there and one at my house."

After filming, he went to the Miramax offices and cut the scenes together onto VHS. Surprise, surprise… it worked! “I got a call from Peter himself, which was amazing, totally mindblowing.”

Elijah Wood is down to join a Marvel movie!

These days, it feels like every actor has had a role in a Marvel movie. Wood has been involved in comic book projects before, such as Sin City (2005), but he’s never appeared in the ever-expanding Marvel universe.

“I haven’t had a chance to play in a giant sandbox in a while…Star Wars gets precedent because I’m a huge Star Wars fan,” he told Entertainment Tonight. “So more of that, certainly in the live-action sphere, would be awesome.”

"But working on a Marvel film, I mean, there’s obviously a whole conversation that happens certainly in film Twitter about sort of the cinematic relevance of Marvel. Is it cinema? All this sort of [expletive]. And whether you like superhero movies or not, they are inherently fun. And those movies are extremely well made. I think getting to play again in that universe’s sandbox would be a blast. It’d be totally awesome, because it’s at such an insane scale."

So, which superhero are we casting Elijah Wood as?

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