Elijah Wood: 'I was thrilled to play Frodo Baggins in The Hobbit'

Is that the Ring? Around the ring finger of Elijah Wood's right hand is a band of silver with strange lettering on it – probably Elvish. As a reward for his lead hobbiting services in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, director Peter Jackson reportedly gave Wood the original Ring. And he still wears it. Doesn't he?

"No. This is Hebrew, " he says, twirling the ring around his finger. "I know, it has a kind of a similar look to it."

Oh.

"I do have the Ring, but it's not inscribed, and it's gold. But I don't think it's real gold – gold-plated. But, no, I don't wear it. I keep it in a little box." Not on a chain around his neck? "I carried it for a long time," he says with mock solemnity.

It would be easy to imagine that in the years since Wood finally hurled that infernal ring into Mount Doom, he has still been burdened by it, dragging himself around an indifferent movie industry where nobody can see him as anything other than the hairy-footed little hero of a colossally successful movie trilogy. He's not at all like Frodo in real life, even if those big blue eyes still look like a special effect. He's dressed in standard hipster/skater attire – plaid shirt, skinny jeans – and he seems relaxed and chatty, often breaking into a bemused, falsetto laugh. If the fate of Star Wars' Mark Hamill ever awaited him, he seems to have avoided it, largely by doing as many un-Tolkeinesque things as possible.

"My immediate feeling after the first Rings movie came out was that I couldn't conceive of doing anything massive again," he says. "So the first thing I worked on was a movie barely anybody saw, called Ash Wednesday, and one of my reasons for doing it was because it was really tiny. I was only in makeup for four minutes a day!"

Wood also cropped up in middle-sized films such as Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Everything Is Illuminated and Sin City, but recently he has been further off the radar, in short films, web films, music and, increasingly, television. "It's definitely not been an intentional thing to shy away from mainstream cinema," he says. "It's more about seizing opportunities that I think are interesting."

This year we've seen him channelling the Beastie Boys' Ad-Rock in their half-hour Fight for Your Right Revisited film, in which he takes drugs, gets stabbed by Chloë Sevigny and ends up urinating over the Beastie Boys from the future (it's a long, silly story). Then there's surreal TV sitcom Wilfred, in which Woods plays a suicidal loser whose life is turned around by a dog. Or rather, everyone else sees Wilfred as a dog; Wood sees him as a lairy Australian in a dog outfit. Before long, he is smoking bongs with his new canine buddy, and defecating in his neighbour's boots. What would Gandalf have to say about his behaviour?

This festive season we'll see a more family-friendly Wood gracing our screens, thank God, in Sky's lavish new rendition of Treasure Island. In the wake of a certain other colossal pirate-related movie franchise, it is amazing nobody thought of dusting off Stevenson's classic before, but this two-parter steers away from Johnny Depp-style camp in the direction of HBO's dark seriousness. There's a bit of dirt and grime to the affair, and the casting is an interesting multiracial mix, with a shaven-headed Eddie Izzard as the wily Long John Silver.

"They described it as Goodfellas with pirates," Wood laughs, as if not quite convinced himself. He plays Ben Gunn, the castaway who comes to figure in the second half of the two-part drama, which was filmed in Puerto Rico. As well as working with Izzard, one of his heroes, Wood relished the chance to create the look of his character – dreadlocks, trinkets, tribal face paint, serious suntan. "I guess he looks like he's been on an island on his own for three years. He's gone down his personal little rabbit hole. And he's mad about cheese. I have some wonderful moments with cheese."

Wood also raves about the fact that Treasure Island's director, Steve Barron, directed some classic music videos of the 80s, including A-Ha's Take On Me and Michael Jackson's Billie Jean. "How about that? Fuckin' incredible isn't it? He was part of that first wave that started with music videos, at that time when MTV had just started. A lot of those guys came into movies that way – David Fincher, Michael Bay …"

Wood was part of that wave too, in a way. His very first job, aged eight, was in the video for Paula Abdul's Forever Your Girl, directed by Fincher. More work followed in commercials, TV shows and music videos, and by 10 he had his first proper movie role, as an immigrant boy in 1930s Baltimore in Barry Levinson's Avalon. The industry liked what it saw and he was off, growing up and learning on the job in movies such as Forever Young, Rob Reiner's North, The Ice Storm and The Faculty. "In some ways my work as a child feels separate. Like I've had two different careers."

Growing up as a child actor in the city of sin traditionally involves checking into rehab before your voice has broken, but Wood avoided that phase. Even he seems surprised. "The only thing I can attribute it to is my mother, and her focus on raising me as a good person above all else. Which isn't to say I haven't had fun. I haven't lead a boring life. But I wasn't … troubled."

Wood's current state doesn't seem to trouble him that much either. Having risen to fame as a cute innocent kid, then a diminutive, desexualised fantasy figure, his status as a mature performer must still be in the balance. But he sees his lower profile less as a result of any "curse of the Ring" than a reflection of the increasingly polarised movie industry: "It's like there's no middle class of movies any more," he complains. "It's either minuscule budgets or it's fucking $200m. You don't need to spend that much money! And it's sort of failing. A lot of films have come out this year that were supposed to be huge and haven't been. That's a bad trend."

Wasn't The Lord of the Rings part of that trend?

"Yeah, it was kind of, wasn't it? I'm biased, but the thing that separates Rings from that crop is that it felt like the world's biggest independent film. It was new territory for everyone, so we were figuring shit out as we went along. Peter [Jackson] was knocking on people's doors asking if we could use their land to pick up some shots. The scale was massive, of course, but it never felt like a blockbuster; it felt intimate and small. Hollywood doesn't always include that spirit."

Which could explain why Wood has returned to the world of big, expensive franchise movies. He's just back from New Zealand, where he was shooting, er, The Hobbit. JRR Tolkien's predecessor to The Lord of the Rings didn't feature Frodo, but Jackson's two-part adaptation, which stars Martin Freeman, has found a way to incorporate the character. Did he think twice about it?

"No. When they told me they had written something that could possibly make it into film, I was thrilled. And I knew it would be really small." Was it weird going back? "Totally! Oh man. That was surreal being in the Bag End set, which is exactly the same, except they've added some new space to it. There are two giant new stages there that are soundproofed. With the old one, you could hear planes overhead."

So what's next?

"Ha ha!" he says, breaking into the falsetto laugh again. He's about to play the killer in a remake of 1980s horror Maniac, he enthuses. It will be shot entirely from his point of view. Then there's another season of Wilfred. And he is about to start his own production company. "I'm loving it, and we haven't even made a movie yet!" Perhaps he can make some of those mid-range movies he's missing. At least there are no more Tolkien books to adapt. "The most surreal thing about going back to New Zealand," he says, "was that I actually turned 19 the first time we were there, in Hobbiton. January 2000. I'm 30 now. It's been that long. I've been in this business for 22 years. Crazy isn't it?"

Treasure Island is on Sky1 HD on 1 and 2 January at 7pm