Elijah Wood reveals the one reason he's so excited for Amazon's Lord of the Rings

Elijah Wood, the star of Peter Jackson's epic Lord of the Rings film trilogy, knows as much about Amazon's upcoming series as much as you do. Which is to say, he knows very little. But what he does know has the former Frodo actor very excited.

"I know as much as anybody else knows," he told Inverse back at the Tribeca Film Festival while promoting his newest film, the black comedy thriller Come to Daddy. "I’m gonna watch with a great deal of curiosity to see what they’re gonna do and how they’ll do it."

But the 39-year-old actor who simply walked into Mordor stills knows more about J.R.R. Tolkien's story than the average person. What he does know is that Amazon isn't straight up adapting Tolkien's trilogy into a new series. Instead, it will explore an earlier timeline.

"It's not going to be Lord of the Rings," he says. "It sounds like it's going to be well before the timeline. It's going to be the Second Age rather than the Third Age, which is Hobbit-Lord of the Rings time. But who knows? I'm fascinated."

“It's not going to be Lord of the Rings... I'm fascinated.”

In 2017, Amazon spent an eye-watering $250 million just for the rights to adapt Tolkien's saga to streaming television. That's $250 million before a dime was spent actually making the show. Since then, teeny bits of new information have surfaced, including the premise that the series will be a distant prequel set in the "Second Age," an era some 3,000-plus years before The Hobbit.

In an interview with The German Tolkien Society, consultant and Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey said the First and Third ages of Tolkien's Middle-earth were "off-limits." Furthermore, the broad strokes of the Second Age would not be altered.

It was in the Second Age when Aragorn's ancestor Isildur defeated Sauron and claimed the One Ring, depicted in the prologue of Peter Jackson's 2001 epic Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

Amazon's untitled Lord of the Rings series is expected to premiere in 2021.

In the new movie Come to Daddy from director Ant Timpson, Wood stars as a character totally different from the noble Frodo Baggins. As "Norval," Elijah Wood is a spoiled Los Angeles musician who is invited by his estranged father to reconnect in person. Thousands of miles away from Beverly Hills, Norval finds himself stranded with someone who isn't who Norval thinks he is.

With a goofy hat, bold mustache, and a trunk full of long, flowing cardigans, Elijah Wood looks more Williamsburg than the Shire. "You have this moment of him getting off the bus and from there, it starts this deterioration process because he's so out of his element," Wood told Inverse about his new role. "A lot of that 'millennial person' was defined from an artifice. From the clothing to the hair and his mustache, we judge him based on those things. I didn't have to do a lot else beyond that."

Come to Daddy is in theaters now.