Tom Wood has one of those faces you remember and names you forget.
The 34-year-old actor made a striking impression in “Ulee’s Gold” as the bitter, incarcerated son, whose boyish features contrast dramatically with his steely demeanor.
If you thought he looked familiar in that movie, all you had to do was add a lot of hair and subtract a few years to place him as the rookie federal agent Noah Newman in 1993’s “The Fugitive.”
Now Wood and Newman are back in the “Fugitive” sequel “U.S. Marshals,” which opened Friday. Newman now is top marshal Tommy Lee Jones’ right-hand man, and the actor’s career has been moving in a similar direction.
“I was doing smaller roles in bigger films,” he said while filming “Marshals” in Chicago late last summer. “Then I started doing bigger roles in smaller films, and now I’m doing a bigger role in a big film. It’s a steady progression.”
Wood’s height — he stands several inches over 6 feet — and baby face give him a distinctive appearance, kind of like a less goofy Judge Reinhold or not-quite-so-pretty Matthew McConaughey. But the combination has been a handicap at times, particularly in live theater.
“The roles I was always going up for was the son, but I’d always tower over whatever actor was cast as the father, so I had a tough time getting stage work in New York,” Wood said. “The best thing I did was I played a romantic lead opposite Laura Dern, because she’s about 5-11.”
Movies could “cheat” about his height, so he eventually moved back to Southern California; he’d grown up in Pasadena before attending college at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. He landed his first roles in Barry Levinson’s “Avalon,” Nora Ephron’s “This Is My Life” and Andrew Davis’ “Under Siege.”
Davis propelled Wood to the next level in “The Fugitive.” “I was laid up with knee surgery not knowing where my next meal was coming from, and I got a call (from Davis) saying come and do this Harrison Ford movie,” the actor recalled.
Wood made another movie with Davis, the sprawling comedy “Steal Big, Steal Little,” before tackling his most substantial dramatic role, Jimmy Jackson in “Ulee’s Gold.”
“I read the role and I thought, well, I’ll never get this,” Wood said. “I never get cast as the bad guy. I’m always the innocent.”
Wood credits writer-director Victor Nunez’s up-close-and-personal style for the movie’s surprising punch.
“He shoots his own camera, and I can hear him breathing at the same time I can hear the film running through the magazine at the same time I’m speaking his words, and that intimacy with a director is something I’ve never experienced before,” Wood said. “Usually the director is in another room watching a bank of video monitors.”
Wood has finished a comedy called “Self Storage” in which he stars with “Marshals” sidekick Joe Pantoliano, and he plans to continue focusing on film. But his biggest thrill was on the stage: playing opposite Jason Robards and Christopher Plummer in the Broadway production of Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land.”
“That was a dream come true,” Wood said. “Being on Broadway just kind of confirmed, OK, I chose the right path, I’m where I’m supposed to be and it’s a good thing.”
