It’s kind of hard to believe that someone could be the focus on a major meme and not catch onto the fact until some time later but it seems Elijah Wood missed out on a major one featuring his very own face for quite some time. In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, he discussed just how wild it was to him seeing what the Lord of the Rings series has eventually inspired in pop culture.
“There’s so much of that ephemera that has continued to express itself, or I mean started expressing itself relatively soon after the films were initially released So I’ve come to just accept that as a part of just this universe of Lord of the Rings expression that continues to expand and grow. People send me these things occasionally like, ‘Have you seen this?’ I’m like, ‘No, but that’s funny. Thanks?'”
It also seems that Wood mostly keeps off of social media so he ended up missing out on a major meme that spawned from the first Lord of the Rings film. All Right Then, Keep Your Secrets spawned as a full meme in 2018 after a Facebook user posted a screen capture from the film captioned, “when I am high and talking to a tree but he won’t answer.” From there, the meme became massively popular across multiple forms of social media but Wood didn’t become aware of it for quite some time.
“But it’s funny because I actually don’t see a lot of it. For instance, the ‘Keep Your Secrets’ thing, which became a meme, people asked me about it and I hadn’t seen it. So people were referencing it like it was a pop culture thing, which it clearly was, but I hadn’t seen it. And I think it’s partially because my experience on Twitter, I’m not really on Facebook. I’m not exposed to that many memes, maybe. So I think I just totally missed it, and maybe I miss a lot of it and maybe that’s for the best.
Elijah Wood also discussed more things in the interview including wanting to be in a Marvel movie and his hopes he might be able to appear in a future Star Wars film.