I have the ring.
I was given the ring.
One of the rings.
There are many.
And I have a pair of hobbit feet.
The hobbit feet do not get worn.
I'm sure they would fit.
My feet haven't shrunk or gotten larger.
Hello.
Hi.
I am Elijah Wood, and Esquire has asked me to explain some things.
So let's dive in, shall we?
Okay, right.
So this is Elijah Wood landed his Lord of the Rings role with an epic audition shot on VHS.
This is true.
I knew that they were auditioning for Lord of the Rings.
Anyone who was an actor or an actress was auditioning for Lord of the Rings.
It was a significant thing that was happening.
And I knew that I wasn't gonna get a chance to audition directly for Peter Jackson, the director.
So my option was to go into the local casting office, be filmed against ostensibly probably like a white background in my normal clothes being the character.
And there was just something about this.
I'd never made my own tape before, but there was something about this particular film that I wanted to do something different that would stand out above everything else or, at the very least, show that I was extremely passionate about being a part of World of the Rings and playing Frodo.
And then I thought, well, I need to look like a hobbit.
So I got a book that had drawings of what hobbits look like.
And I remember from The Hobbit of what hobbits look like.
So, based on that, I went to Western Costume, got a costume that very much resembled actually not dissimilar to what it looked like in the films.
And I gathered some friends of mine and we shot these scenes and then we cut them together that night.
I was then given this VHS tape.
It was before burning DVDs.
This was 1999.
I took that tape to the casting office and dropped it off.
And that's sort of it.
I did that.
Peter then came to Los Angeles.
And I was able to actually meet him and audition for the two of them.
But that's the story behind the tape.
And I think I have a copy.
I think buried somewhere in a box of VHS tapes.
And I don't have a VHS player right now.
And I'd have to go through a lot of boxes to find it.
But it exists.
Lord of the Rings, 10 actors who almost got cast in the trilogy to rule them all.
Some of these I definitely don't know.
Daniel Day-Lewis as Aragorn.
I did not know that.
The studio offered the role to Russell Crowe.
That I also don't think I knew.
There was a scheduling clash with Beautiful Mind.
Honestly can't imagine anyone else but Viggo.
Sean Connery as Gandalf.
I knew that.
James Corden as Sam Gamgee.
Really?
I didn't know that.
Liam Neeson as Boromir.
That I also didn't know.
Uma Thurman as Arwen.
That is very true.
So she couldn't make the shoot because she was pregnant at the time.
Patrick Stewart as Gandalf.
Nicolas Cage as Aragorn.
Oh my God.
That I also hadn't heard.
But honestly, anything played by Nick is exciting and invigorating.
Kate Winslet as Eowyn.
Jake Gyllenhaal as Frodo Batkins.
Amazing.
Again, I mean, not surprised that he was apparently at the top of a shortlist.
Jake's incredible and would have most certainly been on the top of list, so that makes a ton of sense.
When we were at the Oscars in 2010, Paul McCartney sort of entered the area that we were in and I ran up to Peter because I don't think at that point Peter had met Paul.
But Peter, as everyone knows now especially, is a massive Beatles fan.
We went up and said hello to Paul McCartney, and then we asked Paul the truth about the story of this mythic movie that never came to pass.
To which he did remember and said that basically this is all true, he would have played Frodo.
But to hear it from him was just so unbelievably surreal.
So, do I have any fighting words for Paul McCartney should he have been Frodo?
No, I stand aside, sir.
I think about Elijah Wood carrying a $281 million movie franchise at the age of 18 and 19.
And I think of my kid who, at the same age, couldn't carry three bags of groceries from the car to the kitchen.
When these films came into my life, I was a fan of the world.
I had a sense of it.
I knew what hobbits were.
All those things were familiar to me, but Lord of the Rings was not at all.
My first experience of reading Lord of the Rings was the first script.
I brought the books down to New Zealand with me, as everyone did.
They were around on set.
They were everywhere you can imagine.
And at any opportunity one would try and bring things that were in the book, that hadn't made it to the script out.
However, as I started to read the books, I recognized that I was so overwhelmed by what we were doing, the planning that was going into it, that I found it kind of taxing to continue reading the book.
So I stopped reading the book to focus on the scripts, and I never picked it up again.
To this day, I have never finished The Lord of the Rings.
It's embarrassing, but I will read it.
I keep telling myself I will read it.
Debating if The Lord of the Rings films are Thanksgiving movies or Christmas movies.
They're Christmas movies.
The first movie was released December 19th, 2001.
So they always came out around the holidays, and so I considered them to be Christmas movies.
Now, they're really long movies, so if you are watching them at home uninterrupted time during Thanksgiving, it's a good time to watch the trilogy.
But I often hear them as being, yeah, I consider them to be Christmas movies.
Oh, that's amazing.
Elijah Wood is an American actor and producer.
He's best known for his portrayal of the guy in Spy Kids 3D Game Over and then Frodo Baggins.
That's the best.
The guy does come up sometimes.
I had worked on a movie called The Faculty that Robert Rodriguez had directed.
And we had a great experience working together on that.
And he then went and made the first Spy Kids film and then the second, and then he made the third in 3D and he just called and asked if I would come down and play The Guy.
He's like, you know, like, The Guy, it's my version of, like, The Chosen One.
And I was like yeah dude, that sounds insane.
Come on and be this macho, the person who accepts his path and then immediately he's got 99 lives and goes down to zero instantly.
It's very funny.
So yeah, the guy.
I can't believe that's what I'm most known for.
Lord of the Rings Unexpected Friendships ranked.
I didn't know that the Unexpected Friendships needed a ranking.
Are there that many?
Number one, Frodo and Frida.
Frodo and Smeagol.
Unlikely, I suppose.
Unexpected, I guess.
But that speaks to Frodo's humanity.
I think what's special about that relationship is that they share a common link.
Smeagol, being the more innocent, less corrupted version of Gollum, is connected to the more innocent hobbit that he once was.
And Frodo sees that.
And Frodo knows that in Gollum is Smeagol, and therefore that can happen to him.
And that's what makes their relationship so special.
It's kind of the addict seeing an addict.
I know what you're going through.
I know what you've been through.
I know what makes you who you are. ultimately also is what helps Frodo get through.
Because he knows, okay, he still can hold on to something, but it can lead to Gollum.
And Smeagol was a hobbit, after all.
A store hobbit, actually.
They can grow facial hair.
Don't know if you knew that.
The tattoo is famous lore at this stage.
The idea came about because It was this sense of we really are a part of something that feels profound and significant.
And this would be a moment to mark, to sort of link all of us to each other for this experience that we've had.
And someone wisely said maybe we should wait till closer to the end to make sure that it all ends up panning out the way that we feel like it will.
And so about two months before we all wrapped out, the idea kind of came back up again.
Why don't we all get a tattoo as the fellowship?
And we really did feel like the fellowship, especially then.
It was wise to wait the artist and i'm forgetting his name, he generously sort of designed it for us the letters that make the number nine in elvish.
And then we went to a local tattoo shop on cuba street, which is the sort of main drag of various cafes and restaurants and bars that we frequented while we were making the films, and we all were there together and got this tattoo together.
No one said it has to be in one particular spot.
Everyone could kind of make it their own and give it their own sense of identity.
So we did.
He's really cool.
The major prop Ian McKellen took from the set of The Lord of the Rings.
Oh, he took the key.
Oh, that's cool.
The only prop that I took that I asked for was a map of Middle Earth that is the same that appears in the Hobbit book.
But I have the ring, I was given the ring.
One of the rings, there are many.
I was given Sting, so I have Sting at home, and I have a pair of Hobbit feet.
The Hobbit feet do not get worn.
They're in the exact same cardboard sort of rectangular box that they would have come in.
That they did come in.
I'm sure they would fit, my feet haven't shrunk or gotten larger.
But I think latex does shrink a little, so it probably wouldn't fit.
But I better leave it alone.
You were only 18 when you began filming Lord of the Rings.
What advice would you give to your 18 year old self?
Keep a journal.
Don't worry about trying to encapsulate everything that happened in a day and just summarize.
Summarize.
It doesn't have to be a laborious process.
On Lord of the Rings, I did get a journal.
I know Dom kept a journal the entire time.
Orlando took a photo of the day every day.
So he actually has a photo for every day he was in New Zealand.
I believe they're all Polaroids.
Pretty awesome.
I took a lot of photos when I was down there and that was really my way of documenting the experience.
Looking back in the few entries that I do have, it would be kind of an amazing thing to be able to just read, you know.
But also advise my 18-year-old self to read the books.
You're there for 16 months.
You do have time off.
If you're so overwhelmed by the script and making it, just, like, read it on weekends, man.
