Elijah Wood has mercifully avoided one of Hollywood’s deepest elephant traps: once a child star, these days he is addicted to nothing more serious than coffee and cigarettes. Now the young actor needs to negotiate his way round another trap: the typecasting and obscurity that is so often the flip side of overwhelming early fame, in his case the enormous success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yet Wood insists he never worried that he might not escape that particular Hollywood Mordor. “My theory was always that if I continued to work and put myself in roles that were different from Lord of the Rings, people would remember I was not just Frodo, but had been in a lot of other things as well,” he says.
Indeed, Wood started working in Hollywood when he was just eight — first in a Paula Abdul video — and had an impressive career in films such as The Adventures of Huck Finn, Flipper and The Ice Storm well before The Lord of the Rings came along. But he has now set about changing whatever perceptions may linger from his portrayal of Frodo Baggins. Nearly four years after he shot his last scene in New Zealand on the Tolkien epic, Wood is taking his chances in edgy, low-budget independent movies that cost less than a crew lunch on The Lord of the Rings. He popped up last year in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but the controversial new British movie Green Street, set in the violent subculture of London football hooliganism, will define Wood in his first adult leading role. (He is also the star of the forthcoming Everything Is Illuminated, based on the book by Jonathan Safran Foer, directed by the actor Liev Schreiber.) In Green Street, titled Hooligans in the United States, Wood plays Matt Buckner, a young American who comes to London to live with his sister after he has been kicked out of Harvard, where he had been studying journalism. Through his brother-in-law, Pete, played by Charlie Hunnam, he gets involved with a violent gang — a so-called “firm” — of West Ham hooligans called the Green Street Elite (GSE).
Directed by the young German film-maker Lexi Alexander, Green Street is sure to spark controversy because of the degree to which Matt, Wood’s character, is seduced by the violence that fuels the lives of young guys in firms like the GSE, which is clearly based on West Ham’s notorious Inter City Firm (ICF). The film, shot in just five weeks in April and May 2004 on location in London, was inspired by the time Alexander herself spent as a hardcore supporter of SV Waldhof Mannheim football club in Germany as a teenager. Like a British Fight Club, Green Street is suffused with brutality and blood; it has eight serious fight sequences and not everyone gets out alive.
“I wasn’t really familiar with hooliganism,” says Wood. “I knew about football culture and how huge football is, much greater than the fanaticism associated with any sport in the United States. But I didn’t really know about the violence. Then I read the script, which was really shocking about that side of the fans. It was fascinating to me because it was unfamiliar. I loved the idea of this character falling into that world accidentally, and the arc he takes within it. First, he’s attracted to the sense of brotherhood he has with these people and the kind of community they have, which is very strong. But then the violence becomes attractive to him as well.”
To get a feel for the milieu and the people being portrayed, Wood spent two weeks in London last April, before the film started shooting, rehearsing, hanging out with the ICF, going to local pubs and to games, including a tense local derby between West Ham and their bitter rivals, Millwall. Coincidentally, the film centres on the enmity between the two clubs’ firms. “It was an interesting process getting this movie made,” says Wood. “Going into it, we knew there was a lot of controversy associated with the subject, so we didn’t want to be overly honest about the kind of movie we were making. We slightly fabricated what we were doing — to West Ham — to be able to film there, and we changed the movie title to The Yank while we were making it. West Ham thought we were making a movie about football, not about football violence.”
West Ham even allowed them to film at the ground during a match, although filming was nearly shut down at one stage in the game, because the actors were apparently so convincing, the police were worried they would get caught up in real violence.
“We went to a local pub before going to one West Ham game,” Wood recalls. “It was fascinating to watch them get riled up and create this energy before walking to the match. They go there to get pissed and ready. The place fills up with people, songs. One person will start singing, and then the whole pub will start going up in song. It’s electrifying, but scary too. It’s slightly unhinged. Especially because so many people are pissed by the time they leave.
There is something frightening about being in the middle of all of that. As an American, it’s unfamiliar, and having an American there, especially an American actor, was not necessarily something they love — and I certainly got a lot of people making Frodo references! Luckily, people like Lord of the Rings, so it wasn’t so bad. But you really feel like you’re in somebody else’s territory, that you’re encroaching.
“The hooliganism and the violence aside, going to a match is just so exciting,” he adds. “I’m not a huge football fan, or a sports fan, but I’ve never felt the kind of kinetic energy that comes out of a football match.”
Wood says he began to understand why young guys were so attracted to the hooligan life. “Getting involved and getting to know many former and current ICF guys was the most fascinating thing to me,” says Wood. “I think what can easily be a large misconception about hooligans is that they are thugs in their daily lives. Which is not at all the case: many of these are people with families and good jobs. They lead these double lives. Most of the time they are good citizens, not criminals, and then on match day all hell breaks loose.
“I think there’s a variety of reasons for that: the sense of brotherhood, the sense of belonging. Then there’s the rush that comes not even from the violence itself, but from the possibility of violence.”
Wood and the other actors had to train hard for the fight sequences, some of which were very complicated, involving as many as 100 extras. “The fighting style was not sophisticated, because these guys are not exactly talented fighters,” he says. “They are drunk, and they don’t really know a lot about fighting. It’s just sheer brutality. It was hard, because we were aware that it couldn’t look choreographed or professional. The film doesn’t glorify the violence. It shows that you end up losing more than you gain through violence.”
I had met Wood once before, when he was publicising the last of The Lord of the Rings films. He was still living with his mother and younger sister. He was 20, but he seemed like a kid: tiny, his skin almost translucent, peach-fuzz about his chin and upper lip, boyishly overeager to please, but also terribly nervous, chewing gum nonstop, smoking a lot, his nails bitten down. Although Wood was brought up in Hollywood — he and his family moved there when he was eight to pursue his career — in many ways he led a sheltered life. His mother managed his career and, until The Lord of the Rings, always went with him on location. And he was home-schooled, which meant that until his mid-teens, he never had many friends his own age.
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