As a child actor, Elijah Wood was always expected to achieve big things in his acting career, impressing in films such as Forever Young, The War, and North. But of all the roles he would play to date, none would compare with the role of Frodo Baggins, the main protagonist in the ‘greatest book of the 20th Century’. When Wood heard that Peter Jackson would be making a movie on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, he immeaditelly sent in an audition tape in which he was dressed in midievil attire and recited lines from his own copy of Lord of the Rings.
Two years later, and Elijah Wood had finished arguably one of the most gruelling film shoots in history with an 18-month shoot in picturesque New Zealand. Peter Jackson, by picking Elijah Wood (an actor whose previous movies he hadn’t seen before) amongst thousands of other actors, had made the Hobbit actor a star at the age of twenty. A star who for months had the worry of how critics would find his performance as Frodo Baggins hanging over his head like a dark cloud. But on December 19th, fans and critics alike saw just why Elijah Wood was destined for big things only a few years ago.
But now the honeymoon period is over as the Fellowship of the Ring, arguably the easiest of the three performances in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, has been and gone and the real hardship on the road to Mordor begins next December in The Two Towers. How does one portray such a gradual deteriation as the one Frodo Baggins experiences in the Lord of the Rings? That was the question both Elijah and Peter Jackson had to ask themselves after so accurately portraying the innocence and spirit of Frodo Baggins in the Fellowship of the Ring.
So how do you think Elijah Wood will cope with the challange in front of him? One person recently described Frodo ‘deteriorating before your very eyes’ when referring to the upcoming The Two Towers trailer. Does this bode well for the future? And how would you go about portraying such a difficult change, especially when jumping from one movie to the next in a hectic 18-month schedule? We’ll be discussing all this and more this weekend at the Hall of Fire!
Upcoming Discussions:
Feb 16 & 17: The Misconcepted ‘Errors’ in FotR
Feb 23 & 24: The Needed and Wanted on the FotR DVD
Place:
#thehalloffire on theonering.net server; come to theonering.net’s chat room Barliman’s and then type /join #thehalloffire .
Saturday Chat: 5:30 pm ET (17:30) [also 11:30 pm (23:30) CET and 7:30 am Sunday (07:30) AET]
Sunday Chat: 7:00 pm (19:00) CET [also 1:00 pm (13:00) ET and 4:00 am (04:00) Monday morning AET]
ET = Eastern Time, USA’s East Coast
CET = Central European Time, Central Europe
Questions? Topics? Send ‘em here.
