Elijah Wood: Fame, horror and why I’m returning to Lord of the Rings
The actor left Frodo and child stardom behind for an offbeat career in horror films.
He explains why the Tolkien band is now getting back together
by, Jonathan Dean March 6, 2026 The Times
Elijah Wood: “I made it through that wild cultural event, and felt set for the rest of my life”
Elijah Wood looks the same as he always did — the 45-year-old simply has a very boyish face, bright blue eyes and a smile that lights up the room. He was the child star who, at 18, became a megastar when cast as Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, and while a ring that says “Dad” is a sign of ageing, Wood remains so fresh of face that someone should really check for portraits in his attic.
What is even more impressive is that the man has a couple of kids — a son, six, and daughter, four, with his wife, Mette-Marie Kongsved, a producer. We meet early morning Los Angeles time, with Wood having been up since 6:30am putting lunch boxes together. “We’re well out of toddlerville and they’ve entered kid-dom,” he says, beaming. “It’s incredible.” He and Kongsved have been arranging movie nights to introduce the children to the family business. The Wizard of Oz was a hit, even if the original Jumanji was “way scarier and more f***ed-up than I remember.”
Have his kids watched The Lord of the Rings yet? “They have not,” Wood says, smiling. “But only because I genuinely don’t think they’re old enough. I feel like it might be appropriate when they are eight.” And what a weird weekend that will be, watching ten hours of their father traveling from the Shire to Mount Doom, being chased by orcs, saved by elves and nearly eaten by a massive spider.
Wood with his wife, Mette-Marie Kongsved, in 2024
Still, at least they will be able to see him in something. Because for all of his youthful vigour, Wood has spent a lot of the past couple of decades appearing in very adult films. There has been a huge variety since The Return of the King closed the JRR Tolkien series in 2003, but highlights include Sin City, in which he played a serial killer with a penchant for prostitutes; the slasher film Maniac; a Ted Bundy film; and Green Street, a 2005 curio in which he played a thug on the terraces of West Ham. Has he kept up with the Hammers? “I have not,” the actor admits. “I’m more of a movies and music dude. But they’re doing much better now, I think?” They are in the relegation zone. “Oh.”
Next up is the horror sequel Ready or Not 2: Here I Come and we have never been so far from Hobbiton. In the film Wood plays the Lawyer, who presides over a host of rich families out to brutally murder Grace MacCaullay (Samara Weaving).
“I think of it as an action movie with comedic elements,” Wood says. There is quite a lot of horror too, I say. “Yes, it does have trappings of a horror. There are literally exploding bodies. But the reason that horror never goes away is that, as a society, we always have something to be afraid of in real life, but horror is a safe way to experience fear because nothing’s actually going to happen. It’s cathartic.
As the Lawyer in Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
“I’ve been a fan of horror from a young age,” Wood continues, recalling his childhood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa — where he lived with his parents, Debbie and Warren, who ran a deli, and his younger sister, Hannah, and older brother, Zachariah.
“I was six, but my brother is seven years older than me, so he and his friends would rent horror movies and show them to me if I promised not to tell our parents. It was taboo, which made it much more exciting. At six I remember seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. It didn’t repel me, though — it pulled me in.”
I tell Wood that, more than most actors who have been doing this job for a while, he still comes across as, rather sweetly, a film fan. “I am,” he says, laughing. “And that has not diminished.” He buzzes about his production company, SpectreVision; the cult film jamboree Fantastic Fest in Austin; and the thrill of David Cronenberg doing a day of acting on Ready or Not 2. “He loved talking about his work.” Wood is even exhilarated about the Skittles ad he recently made for the Super Bowl, in which he is infuriated by teenagers asking, “Who is Elijah Wood?” He is delirious about this, actually, one of the happiest men I have met.
Wood was talent-spotted at six and moved to Los Angeles with his mother and siblings when he was eight, appearing in a Paula Abdul video and, soon after, having a bit part in Back to the Future Part II. High praise came fast in big films with stars — Forever Young with Mel Gibson; The War with Kevin Costner; North with Bruce Willis; and, above all, Ang Lee’s superb family drama The Ice Storm. The leading critic of the time, Roger Ebert, labelled Wood “the most talented actor, in his age group, in Hollywood history.”
In The War (1994) with Kevin Costner
He started this nearly 40 years ago — has he ever felt jaded? “Never,” he says. “If I’d been on a TV show that lasted 15 years, I could imagine finding it hard to feel the same enthusiasm by year 12, but I’ve been lucky to have this wonderful, unexpected career — even if there have been tons of ebbs and flows. For a long time I was told, ‘You did it! You moved from being a child actor to an adult actor!’ But I definitely had periods where I worked less. Perhaps around my late-twenties? But I never felt jaded or cynical.”
Yet so many child stars struggle in the early limelight. What is Wood’s secret? “The person I credit is my mother,” he says. “She was more concerned with raising a good human rather than how my career was going, and would have taken me out of the industry if she thought it might ruin her child.
“And I don’t know how people who have overnight success cope,” he adds. “It’s a weird thing to be thrust into the public eye and the most unenviable thing is to do it without having tools to deal with it. How can they can keep perspective?
“So it’s fortunate that, by the time The Lord of the Rings entered my life, I had some experience with being recognizable,” he says. “Not to anywhere near the level any of us would encounter on that, but, honestly, going through The Lord of the Rings? When you’ve been through that wild cultural event and made it through feeling whole and human? Well, I felt sort of set for the rest of my life. Like, if that wasn’t going to f*** me up — what will?”
Peter Jackson’s trilogy is a quarter of a century old; the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, opened in cinemas in 2001. Wood was cast as the lead, Frodo, who is charged with saving Middle-earth, after sending in an audition of himself walking through the woods. The Two Towers and The Return of the King followed in 2002 and 2003 and for those years Wood was among the most famous men in the world.
Wood as Frodo in The Lord of the Rings :The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001
He knew that era was over when the final film won 11 Oscars in 2004. Was its success ever a hindrance, in the way Mark Hamill clearly struggled after he first stopped playing Luke Skywalker in 1983? “It never felt like a hindrance,” Wood says. “It was not as if I was only getting offers to be in fantasy films. More than anything, it provided me with opportunity on a simple awareness level. It has only felt like a gift in my life. Not just for those films to mean so much to so many people, but the experience of making them in New Zealand, the friendships…”
I say I recently met Ian McKellen, who played the wizard Gandalf. “Did you?” I read out what McKellen told me: “Elijah Wood is inhuman, angelic. He is perfectly beautiful. I thought, ‘No! Frodo should be an ordinary lad!’ But, then, I went round village after village in New Zealand and everywhere has a statue for the First World War. They all look like Elijah: perfect boys. And when Frodo goes on the journey to save the world, he doesn’t come home. Like those boys did not come home.” Wood looks aghast. “Oh my God — that’s incredible,” he says. “I have never heard that. Wow. It’s so flattering, but also provides incredible historic context. I love him so much.”
Liv Tyler, Ian McKellen and Elijah Wood at the world premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001
McKellen also confirmed that he will return as Gandalf for Andy Serkis’s The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, a film due for release in 2027 that will tell the story of what happened between the end of The Hobbit and the start of The Lord of the Rings. Will Wood be back too? He grins. “It hasn’t been officially announced, but at a convention last August, Ian sort of let the cat out of the bag,” he says. “So there is a good chance. I’m not able to officially say anything until it’s announced, but I will say I’m thrilled with the prospect of another film. It’s always a little nerve-racking when people talk about new movies for a world like Middle-earth. Everyone gets a little protective and hopes it retains its level of integrity, but this story is fun, thrilling. There is a genuine feeling of getting the band back together.
“I’m just excited,” he continues, cat crawling further out of the bag. I say that McKellen told me he could not allow anyone else to play Gandalf. “Well, no, and I totally get that,” Wood says. “I certainly wouldn’t want anybody else to play Frodo either as long as I’m alive and able. And I can also recognize what fun that is going to be — when you are in the cinema and you see the hat turn around and it’s Gandalf. Because I’m also a fan, and excited to see how it all comes together.”
We finish back at the start, when Wood was plucked from nowhere to be a child star. Does he ever wonder what casting agents saw in him? “I don’t know,” he says, sighing, lost in thought. “Because I’m so detached from that person. I was a child, but I’m 45 now, so I don’t know what I did on that Paula Abdul shoot, my first job, that made them go, ‘That’s the kid!’ An openness, maybe?” I say that I can see that, a certain innocence. He smiles. “All I know is that I always had a lot of enthusiasm.”
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is in cinemas on March 20th