ELIJAH WOOD “WILFRED” INTERVIEW
By Abbie Bernstein
Elijah Wood stars in the half-hour dark comedy WILFRED, which airs on FX Thursdays at 10 PM. The show could hardly be more different than LORD OF THE RINGS, but there is a Down Under connection in both. Pretty much everyone knows that LORD OF THE RINGS, the three epic films that starred Wood as the questing hobbit Frodo, were filmed in New Zealand. Although WILFRED is shot in Santa Monica, California, the show has its origins in Australia, where it began life as a short film and then became a television series created by Jason Gann and Adam Zwar. The title character - played in both the old and new editions by co-creator Gann - is a dog, with the catch that Wilfred’s owner’s neighbor Ryan, played by Wood in the U.S. edition, sees and hears not a canine, but a man in a scruffy dog suit. When we first meet Ryan, he’s suicidal (albeit ineffectively), but he’s jolted out of his repressed, pushed-around despondency by Wilfred’s vitality, which is as undeniable as it is often irresponsible and gross.
Wood, originally a native of Iowa, turned thirty this year. He has been acting professionally since he was eight years old (he made his big-screen debut playing video games in BACK TO THE FUTURE II). Most of his career has been in feature films, but Wood says he was actively open to doing television at the time WILFRED came along.
“I think television’s changed so much over the last five or six years and it’s become such an incredible place to explore character and to create great storytelling,” Wood observes..” And there are some incredible directors and actors who have moved to television. So it was definitely a medium I was interested in, and it’s a great medium for comedy as well. So I was reading scripts and considering it, and this just happened to be one of the things that I read. [It] was by far the funniest thing that I read.”
A lot of people find WILFRED peculiar, a quality that Wood says made the project more attractive to him. “I love that. It’s so unique. It is strange, it is difficult to define. And it’s really exciting to be working on something that is not easy to define and is quite unique and has sort of darkness and we can explore that. It’s so wonderful that FX is as open to it as they are, and supportive of it as they are. And one thing I love about the show is, so often, when a show is remade from a foreign country, the actors and some of the creators don’t necessarily come over to the States for that remake. After reading the pilot and loving it and seeing some of the clips from the original show, I felt so great when I knew that Jason was reprising his role and that he was involved creatively. It made me feel so much better about doing something that was a remake of a show that had already been established, because it keeps the integrity of that original piece and a lot of the ideas that were established in that.”
The first time Wood saw WILFRED costar/co-creator Gann in the dog suit was both strange and delightful for the actor, Wood says. “It was awesome. It was in the network test. It was great. Surreal? Yeah, but really exciting and for me, it gave me so much to work with, because there he is, in the wardrobe. It’s just meant to look like it’s a really cheap dog suit. I think that’s part of the charm, is that it doesn’t look professional in any stretch.”
Far from being difficult, Wood says his favorite scenes are those where Ryan sees Wilfred as the Australian bloke in the suit, while other characters see a real dog - even though all the actors on the set are working with Gann, rather than a canine. “Those are the most fun, when there are [multiple] interactions happening at the same time, literally in different dimensions. It’s great - it’s very challenging and there’s a lot of comedy in that.”
Gann has made a painless adjustment from Australia to Los Angeles, Wood notes. “He’s doing really well, from what I understand. He’s made tons of friends. He moved out [to Los Angeles] I guess a couple of months before we started shooting the pilot, so he has gotten himself quite familiar with it.”
Like many people, Wood has had his own real-life experiences with dogs. “I don’t have any animals at the moment, but I’ve had them all my life. I grew up with dogs and cats. I love dogs; I love cats. All sorts, all sizes. The thing about animals, a dog or a cat, you do treat them like a member of the family. They cease to be simply a dog in your mind. You do talk to them, you do interact with them very much, in a way that transcends sort of animal to human, in a way.” Wood adds that he’s never gone so far as to see a dog the way Ryan sees Wilfred, but, “You almost have a human interaction with [a beloved pet], so I think everyone can kind of relate to that.”
Wilfred coaxes Ryan into doing a number of things - some of which are very antisocial by human standards - that he wouldn’t normally do. Back in 2005, Wood starred in the British film GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS, where he played a naïve American whose personality changes radically when he is befriended by the leader of a gang that likes to get into fights at football games (Charlie Hunnam, now on SONS OF ANARCHY, played Wood’s character’s best mate). Does Wood see any similarities between that role and Ryan, insofar as both are mild-mannered guys who form friendships that bring out …? “Different possibilities?” Wood finishes the question. “Yeah, sort of. That’s the first time I’d thought of [a comparison between GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS and WILFRED]. Yeah, I suppose in that regard, it’s similar. But he’s a very different person, for sure.”
Speaking of playing different people, it’s known that Wood will be reprising his LORD OF THE RINGS role as Frodo in THE HOBBIT films, now in production in New Zealand under the direction of RINGS helmer Peter Jackson. Wood first heard about the possibility of being in the new movies from Jackson. “I actually spoke to Peter awhile ago and I had an idea that there was something that they were thinking about. And this is quite some time ago now. So it was in my mind as a possibility, but not as a fully-formed concept that they were sure about until I was given an offer.”
Wood says he expects that his HOBBIT role will be, in terms of screen time (please hold the puns), “Probably very small. I actually don’t know. I probably know just as much about everybody else does. It’ll really just be a nod [to the RINGS films], which I think is great. Look, I’m just excited to go back. You don’t often eleven years down the line get a chance to revisit a character, a place and a time in your life.”
While Wood doesn’t anticipate any problems stepping back into Frodo’s hairy bare feet, he says he really won’t know how easily the character comes back to him until he actually does it. “I played that character for the better part of four years, so I don’t know. It remains to be seen. A friend asked me that same question and I think my immediate answer was, ‘No, I did that for four years, it should be simple.’ But it has been some time, so I’m sure I’ll have to ramp into it a little bit, I’ll have to rewatch some of the films.”
Something entirely new may occur to Wood on a viewing after all this time. He’s found that this can happen when listening to music, he observes. “The first album that I remember having when I was young was THE BEST OF THE MONKEES. I [thought they were wonderful] at the time, and then my brother told me that they were awful. I was five years old. I consequently then rediscovered the Monkees and they are great, contrary to what my brother thinks.”
What are some of his other musical favorites? “I think the first CD I remember buying was THE BEST OF THE TEMPTATIONS. I love the song ‘My Girl’ - I just love that music. I’ve been a huge music fan since I was very young.”
Wood feels there’s a connection between his musical tastes and his childhood start as an actor. “I think [the love of various kinds of music] was slightly inspired by the fact that I was traveling so much as a young person and meeting so many different kinds of people, and I think I was exposed to a lot of different music that I wouldn’t have been otherwise, if I were simply growing up in a kind of normal setting.”
WILFRED isn’t Wood’s first foray into comedy - he was wonderfully sleazy in THE ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND - though he is better known for his dramatic performances. “I’ve also done a few comedy shorts,” he relates, “and I’ve been around the world of comedy, I certainly know people who are very funny, but my experience is limited.”
However, he has done comedy on stage in an appearance in GET MORTIFIED, an unconventional monthly stage show. “The concept [of GET MORTIFIED] is that everybody reads their journal entries or plays or writing from when they were in their adolescence, teenage years,” Wood explains, “the idea being that they’re really embarrassing things and so you read them aloud and it becomes comedy now, catharsis. This guy had written a screenplay when he was young, and his idea, instead of just reading the screenplay on stage, was to get actors to play all the parts and read it as a play onstage. So I played one of the parts in that.”
While WILFRED is certainly something new - for the audience as well as for Wood - it would seem the young actor isn’t in too much danger of being typecast. Not only are there few other hobbit roles to go around, but between his work as real-life writer Jonathan Safran Foer in EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED, his budding thug in GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS and completely unhinged killer Kevin in SIN CITY, it seems like Wood is continuiing to play a wide variety of roles. That’s his hope, at least. “Yeah, it is. I’m always looking to do things that are very different from anything I’ve ever done. I’m always looking to be challenged. And I think I’ve consistently tried to do that. I don’t know if that’s always because I’m trying to avoid being typecast - I think I just want to be challenged and do something different and keep it interesting. If ultimately it presents a side of myself that people aren’t familiar with, then that would be great.”
By Abbie Bernstein - Entertainment Reporter
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