From hobbit to hooligan

Tough nut: Elijah Wood in Green Street

10 April 2012

Brave is an adjective bestowed on actors with an abandon their chosen profession hardly seems to merit. It is 'brave', for instance, when a film star ruins his expensive physique to fatten up for a role, or disguises her supernatural beauty with hideous makeup and prosthetic cellulite.

Actors are 'brave' when they do their own stunts, appear in obscure indies as a sexual deviant or, god forbid, play age-appropriate roles before they hit 60.

When it comes to Elijah Wood, however, 'brave' is the only term that fits the bill. In Green Street he plays a disgraced American student who washes up in London and becomes embroiled in organised football violence.

While researching the role, the 24-year-old Lord Of The Rings star not only downed a pre-match round or five at notorious West Ham pub The Bull, but also attended the game - a typically terrifying confrontation between The Hammers and Millwall at home, the first time the arch-rivals had met in some 15 years.

"It was interesting," he grins, tucking into a heaping pile of Mexican salad at an unassuming West Hollywood restaurant. "In the pub, there was a bit of piss-taking, a lot of 'Oi Frodo!' but nothing negative. And I enjoy a bit of piss-taking, it's very English, a very important part of friendship there.

"It was amazing to get a sense of the energy and how viscerally exciting that pre-match ritual is. And the match was f***ing incredible. I've been to many sporting events in my life, but I've never felt anything like that kind of kinetic energy before. It was extraordinary, a real education."

Despite being in his mid-twenties, Wood is a Hollywood veteran possessed of keen intelligence, innate savviness and a wise head that would sit well on someone twice his age. With his angelic, swimming-pool eyes and faint rumour of facial hair, Wood is disarmingly boyish.

A child actor since his 1989 debut as Video Game Boy #1 in Back To The Future Part II, he rose to prominence via films such as Avalon, The Good Son, The Ice Storm, Deep Impact and The Faculty. The huge success of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy poised him on the brink of major stardom and has allowed him to chose roles on the basis of what appeals to him rather than what will drive his career upwards.

He recently appeared as a creepy scientist in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and as a monstrous, flesh-eating psycho in Sin City. He will next be seen as Jonathan in the screen adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's bestseller Everything Is Illuminated.

He admits that the one stumbling block on the road to outright adult roles is that he looks so young. And he has a point. Apart from his choirboy face, Wood is tiny. And not merely in the manner of most movie stars, who are invariably smaller than you imagine, but flat-out teeny-weeny, Hobbit-size tiny.

Dressed in faded jeans and a bright green tee shirt, rumpled from the dryer rather than artfully distressed, it is hard to envision him ensconced on the treacherous slopes of The Den, engulfed in a boiling sea of Hammers' fans baying for Millwall blood.

It is just this air of fragile naivety - which he cultivated by not delving too deeply into the cult of football violence prior to the shoot - that makes his performance so compelling, even if the film itself is flawed. "My character, Matt, is the outsider discovering this world for the first time," he says.

Unlike Matt though, who seeks solace and companionship in violence, Wood was genuinely shocked when confronted with the ugly reality of The Firm. "It's not for me to judge," he says, evasive at first, "but yeah, I think any organised violence against other people, especially when it's simply about a rivalry only tenuously connected with the game, is frightening. They do some pretty brutal things.

"They like to think they have rules and standards and a sense of morality, skewed though it may be, but they really don't. At the Millwall game, it always felt as if it could completely bust loose at any moment. Which is electrifying on one level but horrifying on another. There were a lot of coins being thrown and, at one point, the West Ham fans attempted to charge the pitch. And we heard that there was a fight scheduled that day near Tower Bridge."

It was here that Wood's research project came to halt. "Part of me wanted to experience it," he admits, "but the idea was kind of ridiculous. There was no need to put myself in harm's way."

What is surprising is that Wood even considered getting close to a real ruck. He seems to be every bit as gentle a soul as his appearance suggests. He lives quietly in Venice, the laid-back beachside community on the fringe of Los Angeles, eschewing the limelight and riding his bike.

A huge music fan, he DJs on alternate Tuesdays at a cosy, celeb-free bar in an unfashionable Hollywood neighbourhood. "Just me and a friend playing all kinds of weird stuff on our iPods," he says.

"I don't really go out that often, and when I do it's not to Chez Blah, Blah, Blah. Not out of choice necessarily. I just don't have a lot of celebrity friends so I don't hang out with celebrities at celebrity hang-outs. I tend to go to neighbourhood places where I'm comfortable and my friends are comfortable."

This is, perhaps, a legacy of his six-week stint in Britain filming Green Street. Although the film explores one of the more unsavoury aspects of British culture it consolidated

Wood's allegiance to a more pleasant national institution, namely the boozer. "I love it," he laughs. "I was already familiar with it to a certain extent from living in New Zealand for Lord Of The Rings. I love that it's a meeting point, and the whole thing of having a long day at work and saying, 'OK, I'm going home for a shower. I'll see you down the pub for a few pints.' I love the social element, the concept of having a local."

Whether that means he'll be dropping in on his mates at The Bull again any time soon he doesn't say. But it would be brave of him if he did.

Green Street opens on Fri 9 Sep.

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