Elijah Wood talks new Ted Bundy film 'No Man of God'

Elijah Wood recently spoke to Yahoo Entertainment about his new film No Man of God which stars him as real-life FBI agent Bill Hagmaier opposite serial killer Ted Bundy (Luke Kirby).

Wood explained how the film tackles head-on the mythology and borderline obsession we have with Bundy, and serial killers in general.

Watch the full video interview above.

Video Transcript

- Could you kill somebody?

- Yeah, I could. And I could get away with it too.

KEVIN POLOWY: So you play Bill Hagmaier--

ELIJAH WOOD: Yeah.

KEVIN POLOWY: --this FBI analyst. One of the Bureau's very first profilers.

ELIJAH WOOD: Right.

KEVIN POLOWY: In the mid '80s, he goes face to face with convicted serial killer Ted Bundy as he awaits his death penalty. Is this your "Silence of the Lambs?" Is this your Clarice Starling? What do you think?

ELIJAH WOOD: Oh, man. I wouldn't be so presumptuous to assume that we're anywhere near that. I just adore that film and the performances in it. But it stands adjacent in the sense that it's certainly dealing with similar material.

It's about Bill Hagmaier, as you said. He's an FBI agent. And it was very early in the days of profiling as a means of gathering information to better sort of search-- seek these people out, know more about them. To be sort of on top of it rather than being reactive.

He does his work in service of the Bureau, and ultimately, the families and the individuals to try and get to the heart of the matter. And that's what makes Bill so unique, and ultimately, why there was humanity at the core of this relationship between him and Ted.

KEVIN POLOWY: So not your "Silence of the Lambs." So we'll just all it your "Dead Man Walking" then. Fine. Fine.

ELIJAH WOOD: This is our-- sort of jokingly, while we were in preproduction on this, we would often refer to it as the Ted Bundy Frost/Nixon.

KEVIN POLOWY: That's a great comp. Did you consider calling it "Bill and Ted's Behavioral Adventure?"

ELIJAH WOOD: I mean, there were certainly jokes on set. But no, it was never a serious consideration.

KEVIN POLOWY: I can imagine. Yeah, I mean, Ted Bundy, it's one of those names-- I mean, unless you're like a hard core true crime obsessive, like it probably runs a very wide gamut in terms of like what people know about him, how much they know about him, what's fact and fiction. Do you think that they're sort of like misconceptions or mistruths out there that have formed over the years that this film examines?

ELIJAH WOOD: It does. I mean, it even deals with it head on. I mean, Ted in the film talks about the mythologising that's been done as a result of, you know, the media. I think at the end of the day, he was very good at projecting an image of himself. But I don't know that he was as intelligent as he made himself out to be.

A lot of his charisma was also artifice. And he had a lot to do with his own mythologising as well.

KEVIN POLOWY: I mean, in general, as a species, why do you think we tend to be so obsessed with serial killers?

ELIJAH WOOD: It's so outside of our realm of understanding from the vast majority of us, thankfully, that it's fascinating to understand what psychologically is taking place to allow for one to engage in that kind of behavior. I think by and large, most serial killers tend to be on the fringes of society or they're shut-ins or they're antisocial. And the thing about Ted is that he led a very successful double life.

And I think that's why people are constantly fascinated by Ted Bundy, because it doesn't make sense with what we kind of understand someone like him to be. He was involved in local politics. He studied law. He could have been a lawyer.

He probably could have worked for the FBI. He really fooled a lot of people. And I think that's why there's a kind of endless fascination about him.