interview6part2.page

Elijah Wood's earliest clear memory is from when he was four or five years old. He was at a party dressed in a page boy's outfit his mother had made for him. "I really had to pee," he says, "and I was embarrassed to tell my mother about it. And I just remember peeing myself and being really embarrassed." (This no longer happens. "Got control of the bladder now," he says.)

His Catholic mother favored biblical names. His older brother was Zachariah, his younger sister would be Hannah. He got Elijah. "He was a prophet," Wood says, "a messenger of God." This Elijah does not imagine himself a messenger of God and has not stayed close to organized Catholicism, but he does try to pray every night before he goes to sleep. He used to feel guilty if he passed out without praying, but these days he's more phlegmatic. "If I pass out," he says, "I pass out. It happens."

Both his parents are from Iowa and were building a life in Cedar Rapids, running a deli together. He was an energetic kid who loved climbing things. That's why they called him Sparkplug (a name he would later take for his production company) and Monkey. He's told that when he was two he locked his mother out of the house, climbed into the cupboards and destroyed the kitchen while she watched through the locked door. He is told that he was laughing, and that he knew what he was doing.

His mother was watching TV when it struck her that one way to channel Elijah's excess energy might be for him to act in commercials. She enrolled him in a local modeling school when he was six. Soon afterward, a talent agent spotted him and asked if he wanted to act. Of course he wanted to act.

Mom and children moved to Los Angeles so that Elijah could seek work. His father later joined them, first getting a job with Federal Express, then selling air-purification systems. Within six weeks, Elijah was cast in Paula Abdul's "Forever Your Girl" video, directed by David Fincher, who would later make Seven, Fight Club and Panic Room. The video featured kids acting as though they were adults, and Elijah played a young executive breaking a pencil. "Very brooding and moody," he recalls.

Wood's early film roles in Back to the Future II, Internal Affairs and Avalon set the pattern for the next few years: playing the wide-eyed but smart kid in films for adults. He'd had no formal training. "I had a knack for it," he says. "I felt like I understood people." Apart from a week back home to pack up, Wood never went back to Iowa, and he has never been back since.

Elijah Wood has largely grown up in a world of adults. In California he went to regular school for the first three years, but then it became tricky, because he was always away on film sets, and after that he was home-schooled. He thinks he was happier this way, though he had one blip when he was about eleven. "I really felt the lack of friends and that social situation of being with people my own age," he says. "I just didn't have anyone to hang out with." For a short while he insisted that he wanted to stop acting, but he changed his mind: "Ultimately I felt like I enjoyed what I was doing much more than what I was missing." He's glad he skipped regular high school: "There are these kinds of social cliques, and do you belong, do you not belong? It's such fucking bullshit, it really is..."
The one adult Wood says he didn't grow up with, even when he was around, was his father. About six years ago, his parents divorced and his dad moved back to Iowa. I ask Wood what his father does now. He pauses then says, "Very good question. I don't know. He does odd jobs. He was painting houses for a while. I'm not sure."

Which, I point out, is an interesting answer in itself.
"Yes," he says perkily. "Speaks quite a lot of that relationship, certainly."

You were close, I ask, until the split?
He shakes his head. "No. It just is what it is. He was always physically there as a father, but never emotionally there. I was not raised by my dad."

He was in the house?
"Yeah. But someone can physically be somewhere and not actually emotionally be present. He just wasn't capable... how can I put this?... He just wasn't an emotional guy. You look at the idea of a mother, and the mother kind of nurtures you and cares about you and is concerned with every detail of your life and upbringing... and my dad just wasn't. He was incapable of it. The relationship was never bad. It just wasn't there. I think some of that also had to do with the fact that I was gone a lot. I have to thank my mom for everything in my life, the person I am today. She sort of overcompensated to raise the family, so I never felt a lack."
Wood says that once his father moved back to Iowa "I didn't really feel the need to call him. We don't really stay in contact. It's off and on."

Does your dad want more contact?
"I think he does, yeah. It's awkward to create a relationship with someone you didn't have a relationship with in the first place... There are probably certain behaviors that I'm angry about that I could get very specific about, but there's no real need to."

But it must have had some effect on the kind of person you are...
"The lack of a father? It very well could have. I'm conscious of..."
Sitting here during this conversation, the striking thing is not how awkward it is or how troubled Wood seems about it but the reverse; though he's talking about something serious and recognizes that, as he talks about it he is never anything other than breezy.

Astin acknowledges that nothing can be as clean and simple as it sometimes appears with Wood. "There's definitely a quality that is searching," he says. "He smokes these clove cigarettes all the time and... it's trying to fill something. It's a very primal..."

Peter Jackson explains how, at first, he had to spur on Wood to inhabit the darker side of Frodo. "He was having to summon up feelings of genuine hatred that he didn't enjoy doing," says Jackson. "Those were the times when I had to say to Elijah, 'I'm not quite believing it - let's do it again.' " And when they did it again, he was there.

I propose to Wood that when darkness doesn't appear easily in someone, especially someone as upbeat and positive as he, one wonders whether there's no darkness there, or that it's buried very deep. And is even darker.
"Because it doesn't get air," he nods, considering the notion. "When something doesn't get air, it smells worse."

Wood is obsessed with music. He is gracious in answering questions, but he's much more excited talking about Strokes B sides. His favorite band is the Smashing Pumpkins, and he talks about how happy he was, recently, when he went to see Billy Corgan's new group, Zwan, and fell into conversation with a rabble of other Pumpkins obsessives. "Talking about rare CDs and bootlegs that we owned, a very geeky conversation," he gleefully reports.