Movies - TV
Elijah Wood's Lord Of The Rings Audition Was A Little Out Of The Ordinary
By STEVEN WARD
When Peter Jackson was casting for “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, it was very important for him to find actors who were fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books or showed deep commitment to the project. So to get the part of Frodo Baggins, Elijah Wood decided to make and send his own audition tape.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Wood explained that he didn’t want to do the usual audition at a casting office because it wouldn’t capture his passion. He said, “I thought, 'I'll put on the Hobbit costume.' You know, I knew [Peter Jackson] was looking for an English actor and I had to sort of basically prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could be English.”
While there is no video of Wood's audition on the Internet yet, the actor provided more details in an GQ interview. He explained, “I went to a vocal coach for the dialect and enlisted some friends, including George Huang, who is a writer and filmmaker. We went out to the woods in Griffith Park and shot two of the audition sequences there and one at my house."
In the same interview, Jackson admitted that he had not previously seen any of Wood's work despite knowing his name. It was his wife and co-writer Fran Walsh who convinced him to watch his tape, and Jackson said, “And I saw — I just saw Frodo. I saw everything that we'd been looking for. And we had maybe auditioned 200 Frodos at that point in time."