ELIJAH WOOD IS fighting through giggles to explain his role in Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which was, essentially, to stand around in a tailored suit and watch all of his costars get drenched in fake blood. His eyes, a disarmingly bright blue in real life, glint with glee as he sets the scene.
The horror sequel follows the 2019 hit Ready or Not, which starred Samara Weaving as Grace, a bride who spends the evening of her wedding with her husband’s über-rich family, engaging in their odd postnuptial tradition of inducting the newest member of their clan via a family game night. The game: hide-and-seek. The rules: She hides, they seek—to kill. It turns out their wealth is the result of a pact with the Devil, and the only way to keep it is to sacrifice Grace by morning. When dawn breaks and she’s still alive, everyone but Grace explodes like a water balloon filled with guts. The sequel kicks off in the immediate aftermath. Grace, her wedding dress still soaked red, is pulled into a double-or-nothing scenario, now with her sister (Kathryn Newton) in tow. This time, they square off against multiple families of Satan-worshipping one-percenters, with Wood as the mysterious character known only as “the Lawyer” adjudicating their game. Run afoul of the rules, and, well...
“The writers refer to bodies exploding as being paffed, which is a reference to the sound it makes,” Wood says, delighted. “It was 325 gallons [of fake blood], apparently.” While he watches on as ever-more-gruesome carnage ensues, the Lawyer is unsettlingly poised, a counterbalance to the various flamboyant and preening scions competing for yet more Faustian fortunes.
But when Wood’s Lawyer flashes that familiar gleeful glint, it signals to the audience that something novel is happening in the movie’s expanding lore. “It’s those moments that there’s opportunity for the character to be amused,” Wood says of how the Lawyer’s reactions act as a barometer for just how wild things are getting. “I think he might have been watching these sorts of events take place over a long period of time. We talked about that a lot, because there’s not really any backstory to the Lawyer at all. So is it possible that he’s immortal?”
In person, Wood is unerringly engaged, talking about Ready or Not 2 almost more as a fan than as one of its stars. He’s wearing ripped jeans, a cardigan, and a ring that spells out “DAD,” giving off the vibe of a normal, 45-year-old father of two who just loves movies. But onscreen, the Lawyer is a prime example of the type of role Wood excels at bringing to life, always in somehow new and surprising ways. That role? Just a really weird dude.
WOOD WAS AROUND 6 or 7 years old when his older brother began renting horror movies with his friends and letting him watch along on the promise that their parents never find out. What would have been nightmare fuel to some kids was for Wood something exhilarating and, he would realise years later, formative.
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“At that time, it was a mixture of it being taboo—the sort of electrifying excitement you get when you’re seeing something you’re not supposed to see,” he says, “and just the fact that it’s scary. All of these things together made for a fun, energetic experience. I really loved those movies. I didn’t find them to be traumatic.”
This led to a lifetime love of horror. “It’s a nuanced relationship that one has to darkness,” he says. He calls Rosemary’s Baby “beautiful and artful.” He describes the iconic slasher Halloween not as scary but as somehow comforting. “There’s a sense of nostalgia that I experience with that movie. I find it cosy, weirdly,” he says. “It’s the soundtrack, it’s the imagery. I find it to be fun.” But he still can be scared. He mentions Funny Games, the Austrian home invasion film often cited as being among the most subversive and upsetting movies ever made, as an example. “The way violence is depicted in that film is very matter-of-fact, which is almost worse,” he says. “I find a movie like that to be very disturbing. I still want to see those movies, but I’m putting myself in that uncomfortable place. But I guess there’s a thrill in that.”
Wood started acting as a child too. His first film appearance came at 8 years old in 1989’s Back to the Future Part II. Through the 1990s, he appeared in movies like The Adventures of Huck Finn and Flipper as a kid and movies like Deep Impact and The Faculty as a teen. He was 18 when he was cast in the role that would change his life: Frodo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s epic The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Four years, three films, and over $2.9 billion at the box office later, Wood had become the face of one of the most successful and influential franchises in cinema history. Starring in a career-defining series so early could be stifling for some actors, but 25 years on, Wood has never run from it. He still gamely answers questions from fans and reporters alike. His enduring friendship with the actors who played his fellow hobbits—Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, and Billy Boyd—goes viral whenever they’re spotted out together or post a group pic on social media. After we meet, it’s reported that Wood will host a Lord of the Rings–themed rave to celebrate the 25th anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring. “It is not a burden to me,” he says. “I’m grateful to not just have been a part of the movies and for what the movies have done for me, but also just that I had that life experience.”
Wood didn’t hesitate to follow up the final LotR installment, 2003’s The Return of the King, with a spate of movies that would launch the next arc of his career. Like Mark Hamill before him and Daniel Radcliffe after, Wood used the capital he’d earned from starring in an era-defining franchise not to chase some narrow definition of Hollywood stardom but instead to pursue projects that reflected his own eclectic tastes. He appeared in genre-defying hits (2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and took the lead in ambitious indies (2005’s Everything Is Illuminated) and started taking swings against type. Robert Rodriguez’s neo-noir anthology Sin City, based on Frank Miller’s graphic novels, gave Wood the chance to go dark as a mute, cannibal serial killer. It was a taste of the other darkly subversive roles he would later take in movies like the gory slasher Maniac, Osgood Perkins’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Monkey, and now Ready or Not 2.
In 2010, he cofounded a production company called SpectreVision that mostly develops smaller horror films and psychological thrillers, most notably the cult hit Mandy, starring Nicolas Cage. Artistically, Wood sees so-called genre movies as an opportunity for a filmmaker to flex their more experimental artistic muscles. “I think of genre as a sort of overarching umbrella—there aren’t any rules, necessarily,” he says. “It allows for a lot of creativity in filmmaking.” He cites his LotR director Peter Jackson as a prime example of this. Jackson’s first feature, the scruffy sci-fi horror comedy Bad Taste, was bootstrapped by the filmmaker and his friends, shot over the span of four years, mostly on weekends.
In Ready or Not 2 codirectors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, Wood found a like-minded creative team. They first reached out via a simple email proposal. “I think the title of the email may have just been ‘Lawyer,’” Wood says. But it was enough to lure him “to come and join this fun sandbox and play.”
IT DIDN’T HURT that a few horror icons also came to play in that sandbox. The Lawyer’s introduction comes in a scene opposite the film’s preeminent family of old-money Satanists, the Danforths. Their patriarch, Chester Danforth, is an intimidating, commanding old man played by visionary horror auteur David Cronenberg. “His films are so unbelievably iconic and influential. I was just nervous to be in his presence,” Wood says. “I even thought beforehand, Would I be able to ask him questions about his work? But he was immediately so disarming and sweet and kind. And it turns out he was very open to talk.” The two discussed how Cronenberg got his start in filmmaking.
But Cronenberg wasn’t the only horror icon in the Danforth clan. Chester’s daughter Ursula was played by Buffy the Vampire Slayer herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and his son Titus was played by one of Wood’s costars from the alien body-snatcher movie The Faculty, Shawn Hatosy. Wood had never met Gellar before, despite having shared a manager for over two decades. And he and Hatosy hadn’t seen each other since The Faculty came out in 1998. “That experience really felt like summer camp for all of us—we were all around the same age,” Wood says of that film’s cast, which also included Josh Hartnett, Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall, and Usher. “So it was really lovely to see him again and reflect on that time, because it was really special.”
The cast of Ready or Not 2 have talked about their filming experience in the same terms. Gellar has said that if The Faculty felt like summer camp for its then-young cast, this movie felt like college—everyone was a little older, a little looser, and a little more comfortable going out on a limb. In short, they were all there to have fun. “I think that really comes across,” Wood says, “despite, you know, the fact that it’s about a group of people trying to commit ritual murder.”
WOOD’S WILLINGNESS TO go weird has served him well outside horror, too, allowing him to work in a wide range of projects that harness his unique energy to great effect. “I’m certainly attracted to weird dudes—to weird characters, or characters that are just different from me and slightly left of center, I suppose,” he says. “But some of that is also what comes to me. Maybe I’m putting that out into the universe.”
However Wood finds the weird, the way he embraces it from every angle makes for a remarkably varied body of work. There’s Wilfred, a dark comedy that ran for four seasons on FX and its sister channel FXX, in which Wood plays a man struggling with mental health issues who befriends a neighbor’s dog—who he sees as a talking man in a dog costume. Wood commits to the absurdist premise and infuses it with empathy and pathos. Then there’s his cameo in Boots Riley’s magic-realist class satire I’m a Virgo, in which he gives an impassioned speech about death penalty incrementalism. He makes the most of his limited time on-screen, making it rousing and funny and, most of all, memorable. He was a welcome addition to the cast of Showtime’s mystery thriller Yellowjackets as Walter, whom he calls an “oddball,” a character who goes toe-to-toe with the eccentric, quasi-sociopathic Misty, played by Christina Ricci (herself often a purveyor of weird characters).
Most recently, he appeared in an episode of Rachel Sennott’s HBO comedy I Love LA as an extremely weird version of himself: a reclusive, germaphobic, brain fog–stricken guy who spends his time watching YouTube clips. “I just found the characterization to be hilarious,” Wood says. “And the opportunity to work with Rachel and True [Whitaker] was too thrilling to pass up.” It’s a master class in performing cringe comedy by leaving your ego back in your dressing room. It’s worth watching just to see Wood rebuff Whitaker’s fangirl advance with the line, delivered with pained earnestness, “I’m not just a fuck machine!”
Even when playing a version of himself, Wood says, “I’m just always interested in characters that are different from who I am and are unlike anything I’ve played before.” But he’ll never fully leave Frodo and The Lord of the Rings behind either. This year, there’s more reason than usual to embrace the role that rocket-boosted his career: The 25th anniversary of the series offers an opportunity to look back, but there’s cause to look forward too. For the first time since Jackson wrapped his prequel trilogy The Hobbit in 2014, a new entry in the franchise is on its way to theaters. Andy Serkis is set to direct and star in a new live-action film, The Hunt for Gollum, reportedly slated for 2027, though Wood hasn’t confirmed if he will return as Frodo (even if Ian McKellen seemingly hinted as much last year).
“The buildup to this next film, and the potential that there could be more—which I think is certainly the intention at Warner Bros.—is kind of wonderful,” Wood says, still being coy about his level of involvement. “It’s really the same creative brain trust from Lord of the Rings, so it doesn’t feel like it’s in the wrong hands. I’m excited to see what they’re going to come up with too and see what they’ll explore. I sit in largely the same seat as you do, in the sense that I don’t know what they’ve got planned.”
When he’s talking about the franchise that made him a star, it becomes clear what drives Wood toward the weirdest corners of the genre landscape: He’s still, first and foremost, chasing the high of being a kid and watching something new, exciting, and, yes, weird. “I have no grand expectations,” he says. “I’m also just a fan of that world.”
Grooming: Melissa DeZarate/A-Frame Agency
Brett Williams, NASM-CPT, PES, a senior editor at Men's Health, is a certified trainer and former pro football player and tech reporter. You can find his work elsewhere at Mashable, Thrillist, and other outlets.
