Elijah Wood has been reflecting on how he managed to stand out in a very competitive field, when angling to be part of Peter Jackson’s planned fantasy trilogy.
In a career respective with GQ (by way of The Hollywood Reporter), Elijah Wood has been reminiscing on how he managed to land the part of Frodo Baggins in the Lord Of The Rings films, a role that was hugely in demand with legions of auditions taking place. With no scripts being sent out in order to protect the story from potential leaks, Wood first had to travel into the casting office to audition, which he duly did. However, Wood realised that if he wanted to stand out, he’d need to do more to capture the imagination of Peter Jackson and his fellow producers.
So that’s exactly what Wood did, but this wasn’t just any old audition tape. “Driving home, I was so immersed in the world, I went to a vocal coach for the dialect and enlisted some friends, including George Huang, who is a writer and filmmaker,” he said. “We went out to the woods in Griffith Park and shot two of the audition sequences there and one at my house.”
Not only did Wood enlist a dialect coach, shoot on location, bring in a professional filmmaker to capture it, but he also then edited it properly, meaning the tape was as impressively professional as you can get. It worked too. The casting department sent it to Jackson who awarded Wood the role. “I got a call from Peter himself, which was amazing, totally mind-blowing,” Wood said.
So there you go, an aspirational morning tale about how going that extra mile can sometimes make all the distance. Wood would of course become synonymous with the role of Frodo and the trilogy of films would become a worldwide success story. Elijah Wood, we salute you.
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