I’ve promised Elijah Wood. I’m not going to use the F-word. Why? “I find it lazy, and a bit irritating, especially in journalism,” he says, his enormous otherworldly eyes flickering with trademark intensity. “It’s like, can you not make another reference? There are just times when you’d rather be addressed by your own name, rather than Frodo.”

There, he said it, not me. Wood, a boyish 27 years old, über-polite and alert, sitting erect on a hardback hotel chair in denims and green shirt, adds that he understands the obsession with the F-word, and with The Lord of the Ringstrilogy in general. But, for now at least, can we not, like, move on?

We do, and to the other F-word – the real one. Because there’s plenty of it in his new movie The Oxford Murders. Here, in a pleasing piece of Da Vinci Code meets Agatha Christie hokum, Wood stars as an American PhD student newly arrived at Oxford and instantly entangled in a series of bizarre murders that may implicate either his hero professor, played by John Hurt, his sexually repressed landlady (Julie Cox), or his vampy nurse girlfriend, played by Almodóvar favourite Leonor Watling. That relationship produces the movie’s raunch, including scenes of Wood sucking freshly cooked spaghetti out of Watling’s cleavage. Which, naturally, was a first. “It’s a funny thing,” he says, eyes brightening. “You’ve got a naked woman in front of you, and part of you wants to be able to enjoy it, but out of respect for the person you’re working with, you can’t.”

It is, naturally, a shock, to be regarding Wood in this most adult of ways. He is the perennial movie child we’ve grown to love. He’s the doe-eyed son from Internal Affairs and Forever Young. He’s the perky preteen from Flipper. Or he’s the delicate sad-faced adolescent from The Ice Storm and Deep Impact. And certainly, he says, audiences seem to regard him with a proprietorial intensity. “They see my early work as my naked baby photos,” he says. “Interviewers will say to me, ‘Oh my God, I’ve watched you grow up on screen!’ And in a way, it’s true.”

Wood is entirely comfortable with a reality that might, to some, seem eerily Truman Show-esque. This is partially due, he says, to his grounded lack of interest in celebrity, and in the trappings of Tinseltown (he lives in the low-key Venice Beach area of LA). But mostly, it’s due to his mother, Debbie. It was his mum who brought Wood, then a child model, from their native Iowa to an LA convention of talent agents when he was aged 7. He was immediately snapped up and cast in a Paula Abdul music video (Forever Your Girl). Soon a six-week stay in LA became permanent, and Debbie, along with Wood’s sister Hannah and brother Zach, moved to the city, leaving father Warren behind (they divorced in 1996). Roles in Back to the Future II, and Barry Levinson’s Avalon followed, and Wood quickly became known as a talent to watch – after seeing him opposite Kevin Costner in The War, the critic Roger Ebert gushed, “He is the most talented actor in his age group in Hollywood history.”

Wood avoided the child-star hell-hole of adolescent burnout (see Macaulay Culkin, Drew Barrymore), and kept working assiduously, with Debbie’s guidance, during his teens – even giving one of his greatest performances, at 16, as the doomed Mikey Carver in The Ice Storm. He says, however, that his real transitional moment, the big life-changer, came at 18, when he was packed off to New Zealand to play “the F-word” in The Lord of the Rings movies. The films owe their success in no small part to Wood’s ability to transform a close-up of his smooth serene features into a pool of human empathy. The films, of course, were profound in other ways, too. “It was the first time that I had lived away from home,” he says. “It was my university. It was my growing experience. It was there that I started to become the man that I am today.”

Today, Wood the man is a full-time actor and part-time music mogul. He owns a music label, Simian Records, and is currently nurturing the talents of two indie jangly US bands, the Apples in Stereo, and Heloise & the Savoir Faire. He has future plans as a film mogul, too, and is currently in the early stages of producing a noir novel adaptation called Black Wings Has My Angel. He hopes to direct, too. Just as he hopes, more than anything, to come to terms with the legacy of the F-word. “John Hurt said to me, ‘Do you realise that it’s never going to go away?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ And he said, ‘No. Really. To this day I still have people coming up to me with photos from Alien. It will never go away.’ ” Wood giggles incredulously to himself. “So, as long as I’m allowed to continue doing what I do, with the freedom I have, then I suppose I’m OK with it. I’m not bothered.” Thanks Frodo.

The Oxford Murders is on nationwide release from Friday 25 April, 2008

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