Elijah Wood embraces the dark side

FOR AN ACTOR forever destined to be known as Frodo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings, Elijah Wood has make a strong attempt to dismantle that image. Think of Sin City, in which he played the sadistic cannibal Kevin: “It was certainly the darkest character I’d ever played up until that point,” he acknowledges when we meet. Or 2012’s Maniac, in which he played a girlstalking killer. Those baby-blue eyes then took on a new chilling dimension.

The actor puts this interest in the macabre down to his early days living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where his folks ran a delicatessen. “The first horror movies that I saw were when I was five or six – and I’ve loved the genre ever since,” he says. “It all started with seeing movies that I wasn’t supposed to be seeing, ones that my brother Zachariah would rent with his friends – that I would get to see unbeknownst to my parents! And it made an impression on me.”

His latest dip into genre territory is Grand Piano – which has been described as “Speed on a keyboard”. This time, it’s not Wood that’s playing the crazed killer, but John Cusack. The film’s premise is ridiculous but riveting: Wood’s concert pianist Tom Selznick is making his return to tinkling the ivories some five years after an onstage meltdown. But as he turns the page of his music sheet, there’s a scrawled note telling him to keep playing or a sniper will kill him and his wife (played by Kerry Bishé, whom Wood dated for a while).

With Cusack’s killer taunting Wood’s character via an earpiece, the actor calls it a “Hitchcockian thriller”, and it’s the sort of film the Master of Suspense would have revelled in.

“It’s incredibly audacious, incredibly ambitious, the concept,” he says. “It’s kind of crazy and all those elements were thrilling and exciting.”

Directed by Spaniard Eugenio Mira, the ultra-tight thriller captured Wood’s imagination from the start. “Seventy per cent of the movie takes place in real time… it’s really quite beautiful,” he says.