Rings Stars Butt of Star Wars Jokes
Staff Reporter

The Lord Of The Rings star Elijah Wood says there was tension between the $650 million epic's stars and those in Star Wars: Episode II during a visit to its sets in Sydney last year.

"We felt like the rogue crew. There was this weird sense that with the two trilogies, there was this odd, undercurrent (of) rivalry," Wood has told American movie magazine Premiere. "They all thought that we were quite strange because we referred to each other as hobbits. They had a few laughs at our expense."

Wood, 20, who stars as the hobbit Frodo in Peter Jackson's Wellington-based project, revealed that the main stars became very close during filming last year. He lived in Wellington for about 15 months during filming.

Wood said some of the stars, including Sir Ian McKellen, got matching Fellowship Of The Ring tattoos.

"Within the first month we were those characters. We called ourselves hobbits because we adopted the relationships that were important to those characters. We were always together. We were on the set together, we went out for meals together, we loved being around each other," he said.

Wood features on the cover of Premiere magazine's August issue, which has the first lengthy interview with a Lord Of The Rings star before the first film is released in December. Wood also continued to praise Jackson.

He and fellow actors gave Jackson a scale model of the director as a hobbit, complete with pointy ears and hairy feet.

"Pete was a total child. He was like a kid in a candy store. He would visually create a moment, and he got so excited about it."