Elijah Wood

Elijah Wood was a working child actor before he was ten, appearing as a kid at a video game cabinet in Back to the Future Part II in 1989 and carrying leads by the mid-1990s in The Good Son and North. The Ice Storm and The Faculty moved him toward adult casting, and then came the decade-defining role: Frodo across all three Lord of the Rings films, with a return in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

The thing Wood does better than almost anyone in his generation is play someone being acted upon. His face registers pressure rather than resistance, which is exactly what Frodo needs and why the character works on screen when he could easily have become a passenger. The same quality gets used differently elsewhere: in Sin City he is a silent predator whose glasses do all the acting, and in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind he is a small, sad man borrowing someone else's intimacy. Casting him against type has become its own minor industry.

Since Middle-earth he has spent his time almost anywhere except the studio middle. He has produced as well as acted, and the filmography since 2010 is full of horror, oddities and character work: Maniac, Cooties, Come to Daddy, The Trust, No Man of God. Television gave him Wilfred, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and the animated Over the Garden Wall. His accolades include two Saturn Awards, a Critics' Choice Award and an Empire Award, along with a Daytime Emmy nomination.