The Ringmaster

Photography Wayne Maser
Text Jason Harper

Elijah Wood is no longer one of us.

Not that he doesn't want to be. He tries hard to appear like us. He puts on no airs and his rag-tag clothes betray no pretensions -- today, for instance, he's wearing a button-up shirt with Abe Lincoln on the pocket. It's equilibrium he strives for. "I like to chat with people and show that I'm as normal as they are," he says. In public, he glad-hands like a Hollywood lobbyist at a campaign stop. His blue eyes and ready smile disarm preconceptions. He's sweet. Nice. Just one of us everyday folks. But for all of that, he's no longer one of us. When women all over the globe adore you, when people you've never met know your name and freak out when you enter the room, when you're cashing checks that outpace 99.9 percent of the world populations' annual income and you're just 21 years old -- you've officially checked out of Hotel Normalcy.

Wood's celebrity gives him superpower.

There is a lot of everyday weirdness that comes with celebrity superpower status. Like most people just out of their teens, Wood is still figuring how best to deal with friends, career and attitude. Add in the women, the money, the fame: it complicates things.

But there is an element of uncommon, perhaps even mystical, weirdness too. For you see, most of the civilized world recognizes poor Elijah Wood as a hobbit. A hair-footed little person. A fanciful creature from a non-existent world.

And though Wood would like to deny it, there are parallels: The hobbit is granted great powers that, if wielded improperly, will ruin him and destroy his world. So he decides to undertake a difficult journey and cast away his powers. Wood, meanwhile, has all the power, money and fame Hollywood can grant upon one man, more than enough to create a coke-frenzied, starlet-devouring monster. Yet Wood does his best to keep it real. He drives a regular car. He lives with his mom.

Elijah Wood has the power. And he says --no.

it's early Saturday afternoon and the diminutive (hell, he's tiny) actor and I are sifting at a sidewalk table outside of Lulus, a casual restaurant in West Hollywood. The customers are studiously ignoring Wood -- look, avert eyes, look, avert eyes. Nobody comes up and gushes. Wood is a young, hip actor, not a revered legend-demigod like, say, Pacino, so gushing is out. Instead, people approach him with pretenses. Inside a CD store, one woman asks for a music recommendation. Bumming a cigarette is another common approach: Wood never says no, but first warns that he smokes Cloves. "Oh, that's okay," they'll say. (The day before, a stoner type bummed a Clove and later complained that it made him lightheaded. "He looks like he smokes pot anyway," Wood says. "Why would that bother him?")

By all appearances, Elijah Wood is king of the world. The second installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy is about to blitzkreig through the holiday movie season and Wood's fame meter will notch up accordingly. He's gone from being a kid actor (Flipper) to a credible adolescent actor (The Ice Storm) to a newly-minted star. Casting him as Frodo Baggins, J.R.R. Tolkien's tiny hero, is right-on because it reflects Wood's own outsized magnetism. To see Wood in real life is to better understand why he's so damn watchable on screen, so big by being natural and small. The CGI orc hordes may be amazing to watch, but Wood's fear and loathing of the task he must fulfill is even more so. He fills Frodo's furry feet so convincingly; that he's got cred with geek hordes around the world and, somehow, manages to maintain his appeal to women as well.

It's always hard to predict what a person will do with the opportunities that life presents them. Elijah Wood and I are discussing women over eggs at Lulu's and he drops this: "I feel that women aren't as attracted to me as I'd like them to be." In the silence that follows, I watch the smoke from the Indonesian cigarette cradled in his fingers slither up the sleeve of his beat-up corduroy sports jacket. His eyes, blue like the tip of an acetylene torch -- they're that blue -- shift around in surprise at this admission. "I'm oddly insecure when it comes to women. It's kind of strange. I'm a really confident individual and I have a lot to offer. But when it comes down to it, I break it down and say, 'Ahhhh.' My friends say that's bullshit. They're, like, 'There's so many women who'd totally love to be with you.' But for some reason, in social situations, I get really nervous."

A moment passes. I'm just looking at him. Eggs grow cold. "For Christ's sake," I say. "All you have to say is, 'Hi, I'm Elijah Wood."'

"I don't really play that card with women," he says. "I guess I could, but I'm really bad at that. I don't chat women up for that purpose." He allows that, yes, he gets approached, but, "I won't make it about anything other than just hanging out. I'll take the flirtation, but it doesn't really go beyond that." He meets both friends and girls in more "organic, chilled-out" situations, he says.

"A lot of guys judge themselves on how many women they've slept with. That's bullshit," he says. "Sexual prowess is not a way to define yourself. Who cares? It's used to establish the pecking order in whatever group you hang out in. It's meaningless.

"I'm a young guy in Hollywood and I'm expected to go out and do the latest 'do' every night and know all of 'them.' People try to define you by that kind of shit. But you can't define me by my job. My job doesn't define me as a person. I define myself."

The day before, Friday afternoon: He's standing there, awkwardly, staring at a window display. I introduce myself and he breaks into an easy smile. We are at a massive independent CD and record store in West Hollywood called Amoeba Music. It's the type of place that employs nerdy music savants who'd fit right in with the bearded Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons. This is Elijah Wood's world, because this is Elijah's not-so-great secret: He's a geek too. You can see it on his happily dazed face as he moves through the islands -- continents! -- of discs, asking the clerks about obscure B-sides from obscure bands.

And it's not a point of contention with Wood. "I'm totally a geek," he says later with a light laugh over burgers and espressos. "I play computer games, collect action figures..." He stops. His shoulders, about as wide in span as Sly Stallone's forearm, rise and fall with the excitement of it all.

How is it that this boyish young man is today's action hero? In the '80s, we watched Rambo shoulder-rocket helicopters out of the sky. In the late'90s, the archetype was a taut Tom Cruise bodysurfing on doomed, exploding helicopters in Mission: Impossible. But with a war with Iraq looming and the perpetual threat of terrorism lurking in the background, our heroes are... geeks. If we're not watching Wood in The Lord of the Rings, it's the wizard-in-training Harry Potter or not-so-hunky Tobey Maguire in Spiderman.

But no matter how anti-heroic today's movie heroes appear, fiction does not always mirror reality. Consider this: Elijah Wood, a mere boy when his mom moved him to L.A. from Iowa so he could pursue a career in movies, took the lead role in a trilogy with a total budget of $270,000,000. You've got to have a certain stature to pull that off. No matter how hobbit-like your exterior, you need some serious John Wayne-type inner character to carry a franchise. The director of the Rings, Peter Jackson, agrees: "Elijah took on an enormous task. He anchored three films, shot simultaneously, out of sequence. It was the most exhausting shooting schedule I have ever seen an actor undertake."

"it was a bit daunting," says Wood. "But what was most daunting was to leave home and live in a foreign country for a year-and-a-half."

That the year-and-a-half spent filming in New Zealand was a life-altering experience is not so unexpected considering the pressure placed upon him. That he would return so unchanged is perhaps more surprising. Down under, the Rings' cast helped Wood shoulder his burden and, in the process, became Wood's true-life crew. He hangs out with Viggo Mortensen (Strider) and Dominic Monaghan (Brandybuck), and is in frequent contact with the rest.

But back in L.A., Wood still prefers to chill at the house with friends rather than venture into the thumping house music at nightclubs. At one point in our conversation he goes so far as to say he doesn't like to party, but then retracts it. "Here's the thing," he says. "Of course I like to have a good time. But I hate clichés. Part of what I hate about the 'party' thing is that, as a young actor in Hollywood, it's expected. In New Zealand, we'd go out to the bars on the weekends. We'd get back from the weekend and go into the office and the other people would say, 'So, did you guys go crazy this weekend? Did you have a fucking crazy party time?' I was like... [annoyed] 'No.' I hated it because it was expected. It made me reject it all the more."

As if trying to prove the point that Hollywood fame and success don't necessarily corrupt someone, Elijah still lives with his mom. Actually he lives on the same grounds as she does in Santa Monica, but in a different house. He's the one who bought the house anyway. I ask him what his mom does. "What does she do? She doesn't do anything," he says, sounding exasperated at the question. He adores his mom. "She raised me, traveled on location with me for the first 13 years of my life in acting -- from eight to 17.

She raised me in the midst of all that, always keeping the focus on me as a person instead of as an actor." He's the breadwinner these days, I note. "Yes, oddly enough. It's an interesting thing. It's weird, right? I came to that realization when I was about 17. But she's my mom and ultimately she will have all the power over me, always. It doesn't matter whose name the house is under. It's mom's fucking house, it's mom's fucking car." He laughs.

Robert Rodriguez, the director of Desperado and Spy Kids, who also directed Wood in The Faculty says, "Elijah is just the antithesis of the fucked-up Hollywood kid. His mom did a great job." Such a good job, in fact, that she's forced Wood to go out and enjoy his money a little, to just break down and buy something already. He snaps CDs by the batch, but not big-ticket items. "I have another check coming soon from the next movie," he says. "I saw this Mustang on a dealer's lot, a '66. It was incredible. I went home all excited and told my mom, 'This car's the shit; just so cool with black leather interior with the ponies...' It was relatively cheap too, like ten grand. So I told her about it and she says, 'Get it. Go out and buy it."' He puts on a face like he was stunned by the simplicity of it. He shakes his head. "But I don't go out and just drop cash. It doesn't come into my head to think that's possible."

So, did he buy it? He laughs. "No."

It's Saturday afternoon at Lulu's. I'm hung over and Elijah is bright and energetic. As we sit drinking coffee, I try for a peek behind the curtain. I want to convince Wood to meet me at a bar tonight. Its not his usual scene, I understand that, but I'm curious to see him around people, fans, liquored-up L.A. women on the make. I'm certain such an environment would dash his claims of shyness, reveal as preposterous the notion that he isn't hit-on all the time. But he has to pick somebody up from the airport tonight, he says. A friend. "Who?" I ask. Finally it drops: his girlfriend. Franka Potente, star of The Bourne Identity and Run Lola Run. They've been dating for six months and he doesn't want to blather on about it.

"Though this part is weird," Elijah says. "One day we were at a hockey game in Canada and the next day we had our pictures in the paper. Another time we had lunch in Manhattan and it showed up in a magazine the next week. I've never dealt with that before. It's a whole new element in my growing type of thing. It's weird and awkward and funny at the same time. But it is a violation."

So is Potente "The One," Is Wood thinking of settling down at the ripe old age of 21? "Thirties," he says. "I won't be ready for a long, long time." Hey, tales of celebrity cratering abound in these True Hollywood Stories-days and Wood recognizes that his next moves, in both private life and his career, will really matter. A wrong choice now could mean the difference between following in the path of Mark Hamill rather than Harrison Ford.

Big Hollywood blockbusters can kill a career. But Wood has already mapped his route to safety. "Immediately, I want to do something smaller," he says. "Not so epic. Something different to keep stretching what I do."

I ask Robert Rodriguez, who's been talking with Wood about another role in one of his films, how difficult he believes it will be for Wood to segue from male ingénue roles to more adult roles. "if he gets the right material, Elijah can easily get people to see him differently," says Rodriguez. "He's an internal actor, very strong, and I'd love to see him in a dark role. Maybe as a villain."

He could pull it off too. Wood has, thankfully, some dark spots in there amid his sunny disposition. He tells me, "I always trip when people are like, 'What you do is so easy. You got it made, man, you don't even have to work.' It pisses me off. What do you mean? What I have to do is so fucking hard. I love it and it's a joy, but the shit I have to deal with is so far beyond what people think. People misinterpret celebrity, misinterpret what those lives are like. They think everything is handed to you on a silver platter, but it fills your life with a lot more complications than you'd ever imagine."

I press Elijah Wood on the subject. We talk about how he feels the need to be 'on' when he's in public, whether he feels pressured to be a man's man. "What it means to be a man these days is lost," he says, suddenly focused. "We used to have hems like Gregory Peck, heroes like Steve McQueen. They were men, but they were layered, they were sensitive. That idea has been lost. Being a man's man; hanging out with the guys for football games; competing for sleeps-with-the-most-women titles -- that's all bullshit. It has nothing to do with manhood. Too many men stand for being macho and nothing else. They're caricatures of men. Then there are the men who are pussies. They're too sensitive and whiny, and they don't stand for anything. There are too many men like that. That's just as bad as the other side." His own goal, he says, is to be his own man, sensitive and strong: basically the kind of guy who doesn't give a shit what anyone thinks. That's a tall order for anyone in the entertainment business.

We made plans to hook up on Sunday morning, to pick up the new Vice City video game Elijah had pre-ordered. But as I rise from bed, hung over again, my cellular rings. It is Elijah. "I'm sorry, man," he says. Today he sounds hung over, too. "I can't make it. I had plans later in the day, but they've been bumped up." I sit back on the bed, no longer afraid of being late. He always makes a point to be early to counteract the late-actor cliché. "No problem," I say. All the publicity, I know, is boring. I ask If he had a good time with Franka last night and he says he did. They hung with friends and crashed at a house in Hollywood.

"Where you headed this morning, then?" I ask.

"Well," he says, laughing. "You won't believe this but..." He tells me, and I laugh too.

So, if you had the superpower and still wanted to be normal, what would you do?

Well, if it was Sunday morning and you were Elijah Wood, you'd be going to Disneyland.