You never know quite what you’re going to get when Elijah Wood shows up onscreen.

After Peter Jackson’s monumental Lord of the Rings trilogy ended, Wood could have easily spent the rest of his Hollywood career coasting on his star-making performance as Frodo Baggins. Instead, he’s spent the decades since choosing some of the most unusual and left-field roles. He was an introverted weirdo teen boy in Over the Garden Wall. He was a chrome-armored Guy in Spy Kids 3D. He talked to a dude in a mangy dog costume in Wilfred. He was the king of Reddit investigators in Yellowjackets Season 2. But his most out-there performance is almost certainly Kevin, the silent cannibal assassin named Kevin in Sin City. It’s a role Wood got through a serendipitous lunchtime chat with director Robert Rodriguez, with whom he had first worked together on The Faculty.

Wood’s latest role is as a deadbeat dad and failed magician (or illusionist, as the character calls himself) named Strawn in the adventure comedy Bookworm — in other words, it’s exactly the kind of unusual weirdo the actor has made a meal out of for his whole career. The movie, which sees Strawn embark on an unexpected trek through the New Zealand wilds with his daughter Mildred (Nell Fisher), also reunites its star with director Ant Timpson and screenwriter Toby Harvard, his collaborators on the 2020 horror comedy Come to Daddy.

Inverse spoke with Wood about how being a fan has led to some of his juiciest roles, why the Over the Garden Wall 10th anniversary stop-motion short made him cry, and what we can expect for Walter and Misty in Yellowjackets Season 3.

In a season finale full of cliffhangers, perhaps no one’s fate seemed as uncertain as Otto Hightower’s. The scheming patriarch, played by Rhys Ifans in HBO’s House of the Dragon, appeared briefly at the very end of Season 2 locked up by an unknown enemy in an undisclosed location. Since then, we’ve been left to wonder what happened to Otto and how his current status will impact the events of House of the Dragon Season 3.

Now, speaking to Inverse to promote his new movie, Venom: The Last Dance, Ifans finally reveals what he knows about Otto Hightower’s situation at the end of House of the Dragon Season 2.