The Best Elijah Wood Movies and Shows, Ranked By How Weird They Are
Few roles come to define a career quite like Frodo Baggins did for Elijah Wood, but he's so much more than that little hobbit these days.
If you zoom out from that three-year period (and his appearance in The Hobbit in 2012), Wood's time in front of the camera has been as weird as it's been varied — and more defined, if anything, by the freakiness of his choices.
Indeed, the actor might have gotten the role in Peter Jackson’s timeless Lord of the Rings trilogy because of those big blue eyes, but most filmmakers he's worked with since have weaponised those same cherubic features to menacing effect.
In the list below, you’ll find ten of the actor’s oddest movies from the last 30 years, ranked by how strange they are. Read on for a bit more info on each one and use the guide to find out where to stream them on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
Released in 2019, Come to Daddy wasn’t the first darkly funny movie to spot Wood’s potential for playing an unlikely killer (that honour goes to earlier movies like Maniac and Sin City) but it has to be the strangest — and given that Wood undoubtedly plays the lead role in this, we’re going to put it at Number One on our reputable list.
The story follows an entitled Californian musician (Wood) as he travels to meet his estranged dad in a cabin in Oregon. As you may expect, a LOT of weird things start to happen. It's wildly unpredictable, has a really dark comedic tone, and wonderfully blends multiple genres into one twisted package.
Six years after working together on I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore, Elijah Wood and that movie's director Macon Blair teamed up again for a remake of the 1984 Troma classic, The Toxic Avenger.
Plans for a remake of the '80s exploitation flick had been doing the rounds in Hollywood for years before Blair finally got one off the ground. He managed to do so with Peter Dinklage in the lead role of Winston Gooze, the mutated superhero, and with Wood as the evil manager of a Nu Metal band called The Killer Nutz, who also works as the muscle for the same big Pharma company responsible for Winston’s mutation. And yes, it’s about as bonkers and fun as it sounds.
Adapted from an Australian show of the same name, Wilfred tells the story of a depressed guy (Wood) who makes friends with his neighbour’s dog. On paper, there's nothing weird about that setup, at least until you realise that the animal appears to him as a grown man in a furry dog suit.
Running for four seasons on FX, Wilfred is probably best described as a surreal buddy comedy in which a downbeat guy essentially gets advice (on life, the universe and everything) from a talking canine.
Twenty six years after starring together in The Ice Storm, Elijah Wood and Christina Ricci reunited in Yellowjackets and quickly became the best part of the show's second season.
Playing out over two time periods, the show follows both a Lord of the Flies setup involving a girls soccer team whose plane crashes in the middle of nowhere in the 1990s, and the present day POV of the ones who survived. Ricci and Wood are excellent as a rather unhinged odd-couple attempting to uncover the truth.
Having won the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance, it’s strange that I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore failed to leave more of a cultural footprint. The movie stars the always great Melanie Lynskey (Wood’s future Yellowjackets co-star) as a woman whose home gets burgled while she’s out at work. She then enlists her weirdo neighbour (a nunchucks-wielding Wood, because of course) to help her track her belongings and the criminals down.
Released in 2017, this was one of the best recent indies to tap into Wood’s capacity for weirdo behaviour. It wasn't the last.
A super short cameo this one, but if you get an oppurtunity to big up Boots Riley’s excellent I’m a Virgo, it’s always good to take it.
The series — a surreal superhero story about a 13-foot boy in Oakland, California — is pretty much what would happen if the movies of Michel Gondry (Be Kind Rewind) and the movies of Ryan Coogler (Creed) had a strange-looking baby. Wood appears in a brief scene as a man working on a theory of how to make capital punishment more humane.
Another recent cameo that ranks high on the Elijah Weird spectrum is his supporting turn in Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey. Similar to Ready or Not 2, his character has a normy self assurance that only makes him creepier to watch.
The character is named Ted Hammerman: a self help guru who offers one of Theo James' protagonists advice on being a good dad while wearing lycra biking gear — which, as we all know, is a sign that he is not to be trusted.
In more recent years, the actor has started to enjoy himself in a number of interesting cameos in weird TV shows and movies. The most recent of these came in Ready or Not: Here I Come, a solid follow-up to the entertaining 2019 manhunt movie in which Samara Weaving played the bride-to-be, or the bride-to-behead, depending on who you’re talking to.
For this one, Wood plays a character called "The Lawyer" who doesn’t do anything explicitly bad on screen aside from explaining the rules of the game. With his relaxed demeanour, however, he comes off as one of the most evil people in it.
One year after The Ice Storm, Wood doubled down on his weirdness factor with The Faculty — a supernatural horror movie set in a high school where many of the teachers have been infected by a mind-controlling parasite.
Similar to the Ang Lee movie, Wood plays an introverted teen here — a photographer for the school newspaper — except that this time he gets the chance to be a low-key hero. It’s not his weirdest role by a long shot, but it’s definitely one of his stranger movies. It's also one of his best.
A fine early example of Woods’ freakiness can be found in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm. The 1970s-set movie paints a compelling portrait of one of those sleepy suburban towns where everyone just about seems happy on the surface — when of course, they're not.
Wood plays Mikey Carver, a shaggy-haired and introverted teenage boy who has a major crush on his neighbour — who's played by Christina Ricci. The two ‘90s legends of course teamed up 26 years later in Yellowjackets for more freaky fun.
