He's the One: Elijah Wood
March 2003 L'uomo Vogue

"He's the ONE: Elijah Wood"

He's the most famous hobbit in the world. I'm waiting for him at the Stir Crazy Café, a place in Melrose Avenue, with some unmatched chairs, two unsteady tables, a bar and three customers immersed in reading, where he gave me the appointment.

He arrives, wearing jeans and a t-shirt with the golden winged eagle of the Grateful Dead. His eyes are big, blue and luminous, his skin clear, the smile disarming, just like Frodo. Of Frodo, the tormented star of “Lord of the Rings”, J.R.R. Tolkien's famous trilogy brought on screen by Peter Jackson, Elijah Wood has this look of uncontaminated innocence that persuaded the New Zealand director to choose him among dozen candidates.

From then his life is changed: at the premiere of “The Two Towers”, the second episode of the trilogy, in New York last December, there was the great events crowd, from Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon to Susan Sarandon with her family. To give an idea of the size of the phenomenon, “The Fellowship of the Ring”, the first episode of the saga, has raised 860 million dollars in a year and has gained 13 Oscar nominations and four wins. But for Elijah those are only details: he wants to talk of his extraordinary professional and human experience.

“I've spent an year and a half in New Zealand: I've arrived there in the summer of '99 and I've returned home in December, 2000”. 16 months during which the Fellowship group has become inseparable. “Very strong friendships have formed among us, the bonds forged during that long journey are destined to last forever” explains Wood. Like the tattoo that he and his nine (!) companions wanted to seal an unforgettable movie: the number nine written in the Elvish' language.

In the last two years Elijah has returned to the Maori country, for reshoots and post production. In the meantime he's starred in two small independent movies: “Try Seventeen”, a comedy with Franka Potente, the 28 year old star of “Run Lola Run” (with whom he's had a love story), and “Ash Wednesday” directed by Edward Burns. Elijah speaks of his directors with admiration and affection, as if for him it is impossible to separate the professional and the human relations.

Personal relations are very important for him, beginning with the familiar ones. He's very close to his mother Deborah, who has directed him towards acting.

“One day my mother saw a TV announcement for a modeling school and decided to enter me. She thought it was an interesting way to address my energy”, he explains while moving his hands with very short, maybe bitten nails. “Mine is not the typical story of an actor that wanted to act at every cost from childhood ” he continues, relaxed. “I've had a very normal childhood in Iowa”. Cedar Rapids, where he was born in January, 1981, is a placid town of almost 200.000 inhabitants where almost nothing interesting happens. When he was 7, Elijah started his adventure and moved to Los Angeles together with his mother. After a dozen commercials, in 1989 he debuted in Paula Abdul's video “Forever Your Girl”, directed by David Fincher and, the same year, in his first film: “Back to the Future II”. From then it's a non-stop: he appears in Barry Levinson's “Avalon”, in Rob Reiner's “North”, in Ang Lee's “The Ice Storm” until the glorious “The Lord of the Rings”. The passage from childhood to adolescence happens without trauma: differently from child stars like Macaulay Culkin or Thora Birch. Elijah doesn't break with his family – he still lives with his mother in Los Angeles – and doesn't end on the New York Post first page for his foolish nights or for having destroyed a Porsche. “I've always worked” he says, calmly “and I think I'm really blessed: I'm 21 years old but I feel more mature and grown up than my contemporaries”

His interests and priorities are way beyond the last role he's obtained. Elijah Wood would like to do something to improve our world: “We're living in a phase of ecological and moral degradation. There's too much negativity and young people are bombarded with a myriad of information sources that generate anxiety and fear. I've not much faith in my generation, which I think is pessimistic and cynical because that's the way it was raised by its parents”. And, after a pause, he concludes “It's difficult to raise a son today: often parents aren't present and there's a lack of communication that I think is dangerous. Young people search for answers in Internet instead than from their parents. Maybe it's only an American problem. It's all in the film “Bowling for Columbine”. He refers to Michael Moore documentary (successfully presented at the latest Cannes Film Festival) in which the director shows an America fascinated by the power of firearms, a country where firearms' selling is not controlled and in which last year there has been 17,000 deaths due to firearms' use (opposed to an average 1,700 in other counties). “It's truly a sad reality” he concludes, dejected.

He switches to entusiastic mode again when he returns to speak of his work and his future plans. Soon he'll start to shoot “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” together with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, a Michael Gondry movie in which Wood's role is that of an young technician specialized in a revolutionary therapy that erases painful memories and readjusts couples in crisis. Among other actors he admires unconditionally Johnny Depp: “He's succeeded in making himself a personal space, choosing always intelligent and different movies, avoiding the mortal traps of celebrity a la Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts. A good actor doesn't need to became famous and be the focus of the attention, so he can't have a normal life anymore.” he reflects speaking, aware that he himself is a victim of the same phenomenon. “I want to live my everyday life as I've always done, without hiding on the streets. I want to continue to speak with people I meet, and communicate with the rest of the world”.

There's another thing that seems to worry young Wood: the inability to love or, better, the absence of romance in the love life of the young people today. “Romance is dead, but personally I still believe in it. There's no more passion in my generation, no more emotions. Even music has not the tension and the poetry it had in the '60 or '70.” He loves old LPs of Joni Mitchell, Velvet Underground, Van Morrison. “Without them there'll be no music today” he states.

Elijah needs true, solid things, things that bear a significance, things that have an history. Because of this he's decided to buy an old Victorian-style house in Echo Park, the Hollywood artists district. “Today there's nothing destined to last: even the houses have not the solid foundations they used to have....To me it's a perfect metaphor of our times” he says, smiling. And he walks away without any one at the Stir Crazy Café noticing him.