From Frodo To Bad Dad: Elijah Wood Comes Full Circle In New Zealand
by, Kylie Klein Nixon August 2, 2024 The Press
Every night, after the day’s shooting wrapped on his latest film, Bookworm, Elijah Wood and his children would share a ritual. As the sun set, the trio would stroll down to the nearby Broken River to say goodnight to the awa, before heading back to their digs and tucking in for the night.
Wood and his family stayed on location during the shoot in Castle Hill, Canterbury, an ancient tumble of boulders that sprout out of the ground like massive, malformed battlements, about an hour inland from Christchurch.
These stones would form the dramatic backdrop for Bookworm’s most pivotal scene, where the feckless, absentee dad played by Wood, is given the opportunity to either step up at last, or fail his daughter yet again.
It’s a location the 43-year-old, Iowa-born actor knows well. Pivotal scenes from his most famous films, The Lord of the Rings, were shot here when he was just 19. Almost 25 years later, Wood is delighted he could return with his partner, Danish producer and costume designer Mette-Marie Kongsved, and their two toddlers to tell a very different sort of family story.
Elijah Wood as Strawn Wise in Bookworm.
“The country is so unbelievably beautiful, and the people are so kind and so wonderful,” says Wood, effusive. “To come full circle, to be able to go back and take my kids, to give them this experience where they could run in the verdant nature of New Zealand, and experience that, was just such a gift.”
New Adventures
Wood is calling from the Catskills in upstate New York, where he’s road-tripping with his whānau ahead of Bookworm’s world premiere at the 28th Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.
Written by UK screenwriter Toby Harvard and New Zealand director Ant Timpson, Bookworm is about as different from The Fellowship of the Ring as a film can get, and still be a Kiwi-made, family-friendly fantasy adventure.
Wood shared the screen with a cast of thousands in LOTR, in Bookworm the majority of the time it’s just him and rising Kiwi star Nell Fisher on screen. Where the budget for Rings was NZ$245 million, Bookworm’s is surely a fraction of that.
Stawn Wise (Wood) and Mildred (Nell Foster) put a new spin
on the classic mismatched duo tale in Bookworm.
Geoffrey Short / supplied
Set firmly in the present, the film tells the story of a bookish 11-year-old girl named Mildred (Fisher) and her somewhat useless illusionist father, Strawn Wise (Wood) who are forced together when her mum, Zo, (Morgana O’Reilly) ends up in hospital.
Desperate to be liked, Strawn agrees to fulfill Zo’s promise to take Mildred camping. The mismatched pair head into the wilds of the South Island, but Mildred has an ulterior motive for going bush, and soon high jinks – and a case of feline cryptozoology – ensue.
It’s the third time Wood has worked with Timpson, the second time he’s been directed by the Auckland-based filmmaker.
Elijah Wood and Kiwi writer/director/producer, Ant Timpson at the Tribeca Film Festival for the release of Come To Daddy.
Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival
Timpson says they first met at the premiere of The Fellowship of the Ring in Wellington, but Wood doesn’t remember it. “Obviously, it was a bit more special for me at that time,” says Timpson. “It was a pretty big night for those people. I was just another face in the crowd.”
They met again in about 2014, at Fantastic Fest, a US film festival dedicated to genre films – anything horror, sci-fi, fantasy or action – that happens each year in Austin, Texas. Both Timpson and Wood are avid genre fans. The pair hit it off immediately.
Their first project together was as co-producers on The Greasy Strangler (2016), made by Wood’s production company SpectreVision. Wood has called the delightful grotesque film one of his favorites.
SpectreVision, which Wood co-founded with directors Daniel Noah and Josh C. Waller, has quietly made a name for itself by creating boundary-pushing films with visionary directors.
The company has produced some absolute bangers, including Ana Lily Amirpour’s Iranian vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), and Panos Cosmatos’ psychedelic retro horror Mandy (2018). Next on the company’s schedule is a British psychological horror starring Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen called Rabbit Trap. Genre films one and all.
“I think genre films, by their nature, don’t have to conform to the same rules that other films have to conform to,” says Wood of his obsession. “They inspire a degree of creativity that is just very exciting. I think that’s why I love them. You can be surprising and exciting and vibrant and make wild choices visually. It’s an incredibly creative space for filmmaking.”
The Greasy Strangler, co-produced by Timpson and Wood.
Wood acted in Timpson’s debut feature, gross-out comedy thriller Come to Daddy (2019), also written by Harvard. A few years later Timpson reached out with another script, Bookworm.
“I was like, ‘Yes, let’s definitely make a movie in New Zealand’,” says Wood. “Any excuse to get back there to film. I also really love working with friends. It’s really fun to work with people that you’ve worked with before.”
A vessel for real life
Wood played the lead, Norval, in Timpson’s macabre genre film,
Come To Daddy.
Timpson and Harvard specifically wrote both the Come to Daddy and the Bookworm roles for Wood. “We would have been up the poo really, if he didn’t like the projects,” says Timpson.
“In a way, the characters he plays in these films, they’re kind of like an avatar for Toby’s and my male insecurities, as fathers and as men. He unfortunately becomes a vessel for real life, small-gauge trauma that we amplify for comedic effect.”
Wood is able to do it because, Timpson says, he has something rare and wonderful in an actor: he can make you connect and care about a character you might otherwise loathe.
“I can’t see it working with many actors, those types of roles, to be honest. If he didn’t bring that kind of empathy and humanity and just vulnerability that you want to get on their side, most people would find them insufferable.
“It’s just that immense, inherent likeability that he’s got, as a human being, that really makes it a fun ride for audiences. He’s very empathetic, and it just comes through, no matter how much we dress him up and put him in these situations.”
Wood as Strawn Wise, coming to terms with fatherhood in the wilds.
Geoffrey Short / supplied
On paper, Wood’s character Strawn Wise, with his stringy hair, black nail polish and skinny jeans, his professional bitterness and competing desperation to be liked, is the absolute worst.
“There are classic examples throughout the world of entertainment of people like that who just never let it go, and sometimes it works for them – in the old days, they’d eventually end up on The Love Boat,” says Timpson.
And yet, just as he did playing cloistered man-child Norval in Come to Daddy, Wood makes you want to root for Strawn.
“Look, what a phenomenal name. We’ve given him two bangers, Norval and now Strawn. There’s a lot of baggage for him to work around straight away with just the name.”
Wood as Norval in Come To Daddy.
For Wood, the script and the film’s greatest achievement is that it manages to embrace the same sensibilities as Come to Daddy, “but through a more family-friendly lens”.
“[Ant] was really keen to make something that felt like a throwback to movies that he grew up with in the 70s, these low-stakes, fun for everybody, family films that presented a slight bit of danger – but not too much – and a great deal of comedy. I know it was really inspired by his fear of failing, essentially, in front of his kids. That was this existential fear that cut to the core of him as a father.”
Wood says he hasn’t felt that fear himself yet, his kids are still too young. But it’s clear he understands the assignment.
He and Kongsved welcomed their first child, a son, in 2019, and their second, a daughter, in 2022. Intensely private, you won’t find the children’s names in any of the usual celebrity publications, and the couple doesn’t share pictures of them, or appear in public with them.
Wood and his partner Mette-Marie Kongsved have been together for about six years. They met on the set of I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore. Presley Ann / Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
While the kids know their dad makes movies, he hasn’t shared many of his films with them. They haven’t even seen the animated children’s film Happy Feet (2006), in which he voices lead dancing penguin, Mumble.
“I was weirdly reticent to show them, just because I think I wasn’t ready to articulate to them that that’s a part of my life. I think I was, in some ways, maybe keeping them unnecessarily shielded from the work that I do. But I think the cat’s kind of out of the bag,” he says.
“It’s not often that I get to make things that are appropriate for my kids. Working on films that my kids could see, that’s certainly exciting to me, because there’s a lot of my movies that my kids can’t see.”
Frodo’s gift
Wood grew up in front of the camera. His first role was a featured bit-part in Back To The Future II (1989) – he plays Video Game Boy 1, a kid left deeply unimpressed by Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) and his vintage video game skills – when he was just 8.
Wood as Walter, with co-star Christina Ricci as Misty, in Yellowjackets.
One of the few child stars to make a successful leap from screen kid to adult actor, Wood has starred in more than 50 feature and short films, and voiced a further seven. He’s also done his share of TV – he’s currently in season 2 of Yellowjackets (Neon). Despite his fame, Wood keeps a relatively low profile and has certainly never been fodder for the celebrity gossip sites.
“I think part of that is lifestyle choices, not really engaging with the public in a way that would be enticing to be written about,” he says. “Some of it is just simply existing outside of [the celebrity lifestyle]. I don’t go to a lot of parties. I don’t go to a lot of premieres.
“Certainly being a part of something like Lord of the Rings, which is bigger than anything, you are instantly recognizable. Trying to carve out and maintain a sense of normalcy outside of the realm of everything else that is uncontrollable is important.”
That said, he’s at peace with the level of fame LOTR brought him, and he still has warm feelings towards Frodo and the Tolkien universe.
Elijah Wood, right, as Frodo Baggins in The Lord Of The Rings part one, The Fellowship Of The Ring, with his fellow Hobbits:
Sam (Sean Astin), Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic Monaghan).
He’s talked to fellow LOTR alum Andy Serkis (Gollum) about the two new films he’s planning to bring to the Tolkienverse, and says it would be an “amazing honour to jump into that world” as a producer or director.
After a career spanning more than 30 years, Wood doesn’t mind that Frodo is still the biggest, best-known role he’s ever played.
“I love the character. I love that he’s a part of me. I love that he’s a part of my life. That character represents one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had. Living in New Zealand, working on those films over the course of four years was a gift. So, no, I’ve never felt weighed down by it.
“I think there’s a perception that the choices that I’ve made since then have been some kind of effort to move away from that. And that’s not entirely the case.”
Wood between takes on the set of Bookworm, which was filmed on location in the South Island.
Dean MacKenzie, DEAN MACKENZIE / Supplied
If anything, the roles he’s chosen were about growing up, his changing tastes and a professional desire to play someone new every time.
“Certainly, at 20 years on, I’m not making any effort to run away from Frodo, and the reality is that Frodo will be with me forever. And I’m so grateful.”
Bookworm is in NZ cinemas nationwide, from August 8.