Remember Elijah Wood? You won’t believe what he looks like now

In 2003, Elijah Wood seemed to have the world at his feet. He was one of the world’s most popular hobbits, he’d just starred in the Oscar winning classic The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, and he probably had a really hot girlfriend as well.

Sadly, now he is a tapir.

What went so wrong for Elijah?

“I don’t think he was ever happy with the huge fame and success that the Lord of the Rings films brought him,” explained Stewart James, an ex-paperboy who used to deliver newspapers to Elijah’s sister.

“It just wasn’t who he was. So, I think he just started to recoil from that life and become more and more private.”

However, even trying to live a quiet life was impossible for the young star as fans would recognise him and plague him for autographs, photographs and recreations of that bit where Gollum tries to get at his crack of doom.

So he began altering his appearance.

“At first it was just a wild new haircut, or some facial hair,” said Kelly Grace, a Pasadena grocer who’s fairly sure that she once sold Elijah some potatoes.

“But then I heard that it got more extreme and he began having these surgical procedures to really alter his appearance until one day, he was a tapir.

“As I understand it, he moved down into South America somewhere and now spends his days just wallowing in mud and walking about on grasslands with other tapirs.

“It’s sad, but I guess if he’s happy being a tapir. What business is it of mine?”

Elijah Wood is, of course, not the only Lord of the Rings star who has since shunned fame. Billy Boyd famously became a trappist monk and John Rhys-Davies now lives in a hole in a remote part of India.