Elijah Wood has curated such a fun, eclectic career that it’s easy to forget he began as a child actor in the late 1980s, with some strange deep-cut roles. He’s currently promoting his part in The Toxic Avenger, which will finally hit theaters on August 29th, but ComicBook caught up with him at San Diego Comic-Con 2025 to ask about some of his other work. Asked if there was a role from his childhood he was “most proud of,” Wood quickly landed on the 1994 dramedy North. He starred in the globe-trotting fantasy film, which didn’t get great reviews at the time. Still, Wood looks back fondly on the movie, and he was glad to hear some fans do too.
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ComicBook host Chris Killian mentioned his own favorite childhood performance by Wood, the 1992 drama Radio Flyer. “I love Radio Flyer,” Wood agreed, but he didn’t have to think long to come up with his own pick, North. “I haven’t seen this in a long time, but I had such a fun time making it,” he said. “It was much-maligned at the time. Famously, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel hated it — North.”
North was adapted from a novel by Alan Zweibel published in 1984, and Zweibel wrote the screenplay himself, in addition to taking a minor role on screen. The movie was directed by Rob Reiner and included a star-studded cast, including Bruce Willis, Jon Lovitz, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and many others. It even includes Scarlett Johansson’s big screen debut at nine years old.
Wood plays a 9-year-old boy named North who feels underappreciated by his parents, and decides to “divorce” them, then go searching for parents more up to his standards. North travels around the U.S. and meets with several parental candidates that don’t seem much better to him. Willis narrates, and along the way, he repeatedly appears to North as a mysterious stranger offering sage advice.
Wood wasn’t exaggerating when he called the movie “much-maligned” — At the time of this writing, it has a 14% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average score of 3.7 out of 10. It was a commercial failure as well, earning far less than its budget demanded, and it was condemned for its depiction of ethnic stereotypes in some scenes. Richard Roeper even included North in a list of the 40 worst movie he has ever seen in his 2003 book on film criticism, noting that it was probably the hardest movie to sit through on the entire list.
As for the legendary Ebert, his take on North was not subtle. He wrote, “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.”
If you’re a fan of this movie, at least you know you’re in a small group that includes Wood himself. For those curious, North is streaming now on for free on Tubi. It’s also available to digitally rent or purchase on PVOD stores.
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