Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood still hasn't fully read the J.R.R. Tolkien novels the trilogy was based on. Lord of the Rings follows the quest of a group of intrepid volunteers from different races and creeds in the fantasy world of Middle-Earth on their quest to protect hobbit Frodo Baggins as he takes the One Ring (which controls all the other Rings of Power) to the evil land of Mordor to destroy it by throwing it into the fires of Mount Doom. The films were a massive success both commercially and critically, nabbing 30 Oscar nominations between them and winning 17 of them. The third film, Return of the King, set a record for most Oscar wins for a single film and the best nomination-win ratio.
Before being cast in the lead in the massive fantasy trilogy, Elijah Wood was already en route to becoming a teen star in his own right. As a child, he had appeared in films like Flipper, The Adventures of Huck Finn, and North, which Roger Ebert famously despised. In 1998 he scored the double hitter of Deep Impact and the Kevin Williamson horror-comedy The Faculty, which likely would have taken his career in a very different (though successful) direction if he hadn't been cast as Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings, which began shooting when he was only 18 years old.
Speaking with Esquire on the 20th anniversary of Fellowship of the Ring, Elijah Wood revealed that he still hasn't finished reading the books. He admits that "the book is dense and verbose and incredible and literary and beautiful," but trying to read it while prepping his character on set was "taxing." He thinks it's "ridiculous" that he still hasn't finished the books since then, especially because "everybody else has read it." Read the full quote below:
The book is dense and verbose and incredible and literary and beautiful, but heavy. I found it taxing to read the book with all the work in tandem I was doing on my character. I sort of pivoted my focus to just live in the world of the character as written in the scripts and trust the process.
I still haven’t read it, 20 years later. It's ridiculous that I haven’t. It is my cross to bear. It's so dumb. Everybody else has read it.
To be fair to Elijah Wood, Lord of the Rings totals 1137 pages, a daunting task if one is already in the middle of the process of reading scripts and memorizing lines. J.R.R. Tolkien's story is iconic and powerfully creative, but it also stems from his academic perspective as a historian and etymologist. For those with a more immediate interest in the goings-on of Middle-Earth, the films proved to be a major boon that they ultimately preferred to the books.
Other fans who haven't been able to get through the dense tomes of Lord of the Rings can at least rest assured that even Frodo himself didn't find it to be an easy task. The books and the films are both whole works that carve their own path. While they might work best together in tandem, depending on one's taste, they can certainly take one or the other.
Source: Esquire