Page 3 Profile: Elijah Wood, actor

Actor Elijah Wood poses at the 45th Sitges Film Festival on October 6, 2012 in Sitges, Spain (Getty)

Frodo!

Think again; Wood’s gotten nasty.

What do you mean?

His next film, ‘Maniac’, is so scary it’s been banned… in New Zealand!

The little hobbit chap? Scary? I don’t believe it

No longer a four-foot man with hairy feet, Wood, in his quest to avoid typecasting, took the lead role in the remake of the William Lustig cult slasher. According to the country’s censors, it contains “content that may disturb”, and a spokesman for the New Zealand Film Festival branded it “injurious to the public good”.

Injurious..?

Their main problem is that the whole movie is shot from the point of view of the killer, who the audience only glimpses in reflections. Apparently, “mixed with the psychopathic behaviour of actor Elijah Wood [it] is more than disturbing… it’s potentially dangerous in the hands of the wrong person”.

That sounds a million miles away from The Shire. So how gory is it?

Pretty grim: a mannequin store owner-cum-serial killer with a penchant for scalping women has his deepest, darkest desires stirred when a young, female artist enters his life…

Enough!

I know, what happened to the Wood we knew and loved? All clean-cut, doe-eyed and umelted-butter-mouthed, he was a tap-dancing penguin in Happy Feet, played Tom Thumb, The Artful Dodger and, of course, Frodo Baggins. Now all of a sudden he’s running around slicing off the tops off girls’ heads.

A troubled youth, perhaps.

Easy now, you’re blurring fact and fiction, actor and character. His younger years were pretty cushty: moving to LA when he was nine, he landed his first acting gig in the music video for Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl”. Next, he starred in Back To The Future Part II, before his big break came in 2001 with The Lord of the Rings.

Come here my pretty…

What? Oh no, he’s got to you. I’m out of here! Someone book me a one-way ticket to NZ…