Evangeline Lilly: New Zealand was great as a new mom

By covermg.com | Cover Media – 14 hours ago

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• View PhotoEvangeline Lilly
• View PhotoEvangeline Lilly

Canadian beauty Evangeline Lilly, 34, known for her role in the TV hit drama Lost in which she starred as Kate Austen from 2004 to 2010, now turns to a career on the big screen playing Elf Tauriel in the upcoming movie, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

As a teenager, Lilly was discovered by a Ford Models agent and landed several TV commercials and nonspeaking parts in TV shows such as Smallville and Kingdom Hospital. Lilly most recently appeared in The Hurt Locker in 2009, and Real Steel in 2011.
In her personal life, she was married to Canadian hockey player, Murray Hone, from 2003 to 2004, and from 2004 to 2009 she dated Lost co-star Dominic Monaghan. She gave birth to her first child, a son named Kahekili with boyfriend Norman Kali in Hawaii in 2011.
In New York to do press, gone are her signature long tresses and instead she’s sporting a chic bob haircut. To compliment her new sophisticated style she is wearing a black fitted suit.
THE INTERVIEW:
Q. Why the haircut?
LILLY: I’ve always liked short hair on women. I think it’s cool. I would have done it earlier but I was contracted to keep it long for Lost and for a cosmetic endorsement campaign.
Q: Do you have any standout memories of shooting in New Zealand?
LILLY: Well, I was a new mum. And I came out to New Zealand and started work when my son was only three-months-old. So I was in the throes of nursing, and trying to recover from labour, from my thirty hour labour, and I was very, very focused inwardly, like my little nucleus at home. I was in that nesting time and that was a wonderful place to do that. New Zealand is like America in the 1950s. It’s so quaint and sweet and safe and friendly and it’s just such a neat thing to be able to go back in time and to a more innocent time, which is what it felt like. Children are so much less jaded, family values are still so strong, and it was a really neat place to be a new mom.
Q: Being a young mom, does it take a special project like The Hobbit these days just to get you out of the house to work?
LILLY: Hell yeah! When they called me, I thought I had retired. I thought I was done with acting, I was like, ‘I am a mum now, this is my life now and this is what I am going to do.’ And I was just totally happy and content with that. And, I don’t know if there is any other role in all of the world that could have got me to do it just three months out of labour, to start working, to start doing stunts in another country, for a year. But it was a Woodland Elf in The Hobbit and there was just no way I could say no. And what is exciting for me... I believe the universe works exactly the way it should, and my experience on The Hobbit was so positive, I had so much fun, and all of my experiences surrounding it, doing press and whatnot, has been a really different experience for me than it was when I was working on Lost.
Q: What do you mean? You weren’t happy on Lost?
LILLY: Well, with The Hobbit, it was the first time in ten years that I actually am like, ‘I think I like acting.’ (laughs) This might be fun and I actually might want to do this more, and if it wasn’t for them pulling me out of bed and saying, ‘You are coming to work with us,’ I might have retired at that point. I may have never done a film again. I think I made it fairly clear that it wasn’t feeling like the right thing for me. But this experience and Real Steel, I had a wonderful experience on Real Steel, also. So those two films were so collaborative and so relaxed and just such a wonderful experience, that I am now like, ‘Oh let’s just see what else is out there. Let’s see if there is any other wonderful thing out there that I can have fun doing.’
Q: I know you used to describe yourself as a tomboy. Do you still see yourself that way?
LILLY: Well, no. I’m in my 30s now, I can’t afford to be a tom boy now – my bones won’t allow it.
Q: How do you feel about this time in your life?
LILLY: I love being in my 30s. I think a woman’s prime is from 30 to 50. I think those 20 years are the best years of a woman’s life and I’m happy to be in them
Q: I know you’ve never been a huge fan of being famous. How do you feel about it now?
LILLY: I try very hard to create a world where it doesn’t exist. I like being a normal person, living a normal life and that took me a long time how to figure out how to do that. For the first couple of years on Lost, I was just floundering, not knowing what to do or how to deal with it. I was very stressed and very unhappy and I wanted to quit for the first two and a half years but I’d signed a contract. Then I started to understand it a bit better and to learn about boundaries and not feeling guilty about putting down boundaries. It doesn’t make you a mean person, it makes you a sane person.
Q: What’s your relationship with Tolkien books?
LILLY: I was a big fan of the books. When I was a young teen, The Hobbit was my favourite book. Actually, when I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy I put it down with about fifty pages left in the book and I never picked it up again. It was Return of the King and because I loved it so much, I didn’t want it to end. I refused to finish the book because then it would just live on in my mind forever. And then later on, my sister ended up reading it and she told me, ‘It’s such a good thing you stopped reading fifty pages before the end because the end is devastating.’ (laughs)
Q: So when did you read them? Or you never read them?
LILLY: When I watched the movie, I went, ‘Oh, so that’s what happens at the end,’ because I never finished the books. I left those fifty pages just to let my imagination go with it.
Q: Did you go back to the book before you started shooting it?
LILLY: I went back and re-read The Hobbit and I was shocked at how simple it is. As a kid it seemed like a real complex, interesting, difficult story to read. And I went back and I realised that it’s just a kid’s book. Forgive me, Tolkien, may he rest in peace, but kind of a boring book for adults to read. And it doesn’t have a lot of twists and turns in the plot and there’s very little character development. It made me realise why Peter (Jackson) had made the decisions he made about the characters.
Q: So you’re a fan of sci-fi?
LILLY: I’m a real fantasy geek, I love fantasy. I am not a sci-fi person, but I love fantasy.
Q: And what can you tell me about your character?
LILLY: Oh I can go on and on forever because she is so cool. (laughter) She’s very different from the elves you have seen so far in Rings, she’s not a high elf, she is a commoner; she is a lowly woodland elf which means she’s not only not of royal blood but she’s shorter, she looks different, she has red hair and green eyes, and not the blonde hair and the blue eyes like the others. She is a little bit more reckless than you would be used to seeing an elf behave. She’s ruthless, she is lethal and she is dangerous. I think of the Woodland Elves as a cross between being high elves and pixies. They flit about the trees and they protect their realm and they won’t stand for any yucky invaders in their world.
Q: Does she have a love interest?
LILLY: (laughs) There is a bit of romantic part to her personal story, but I can’t tell you who or where or when or how or why, because I would probably be fired or never work in this town again. But yes, she does.
Q: You’ve said that a lot of fans have been pretty opinionated about your role and the movie in general. Did you follow any of that on the internet or did you try to avoid it?
LILLY: (laughs) Every once in awhile, something trickles through where I will be talking to somebody on line who will say, ‘Just ignore everything they are saying about you.’ And I think, (gasps) ‘What are they saying about me?!’ (laughter) Because I don’t seek out negative press, it’s just terrible for your mental state of being. So I spend my time when I go online to discuss my character. I will go to my fan sites, I will go to my Twitter page or my Facebook page and I will engage the people there who appreciate me. And it’s fun because even those people will have opinions about it because nobody can be opinion-less if they are a fan of the films. So, I like talking to the people who get it. It’s very nice for me. I used to avoid hearing comments about all the awful stuff because it’s not good for me and it will just make me feel scared. (laughs) I might walk down the street, someone might take me out.
Q: But don’t you think that it’s because people are so protective about the franchise rather than there being an issue with the character or with you as an actor, it’s just that they don’t want to see any change or deviation?
LILLY: Listen, when I heard that The Lord of the Rings was coming out on film, I refused to see it. I was like, ‘No way. Nobody will do those books justice. Nobody.’ And of course I had never heard of this Peter Jackson guy from New Zealand, whoever that was at the time. I wasn’t aware of The Lovely Bones like a lot of people were, and I had no concept of who he was. All I knew was that I was not going to see those films because I wanted to protect the images that I had in my mind. Eventually, I ended up going because my whole family went as a Christmas holiday outing together, and I would have been the only person who wouldn’t have gone, (laughs) so I was like, ‘Okay, I will go reluctantly.’ And I was so amazed that everything I saw was what I had envisioned in my mind and there was about two things out of the whole trilogy that I went, ‘That’s not really how I pictured it.’ Just two things out of nine hours of film. So once that happened, in my mind, Peter earned the title of the ambassador of Tolkien’s work. And therefore, when I was called and asked to play an elf in The Hobbit, I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ (laughter) because the Woodland Elves were my favourite characters and I would dream when I was a little girl of being a Woodland Elf. And I would fantasise at night about being a Woodland Elf.
Q: Did you get to fly?
LILLY: Did I get to fly? (laughs) Well kind of, no, elves don’t really fly. They wouldn’t let me get on the wire. Do you know why they wouldn’t let me get on the wire? Can I complain for a minute? Can I be dissenting? Because they were so unorganised that there was never time to get the training in. They would never know what we were shooting, and so it was like, suddenly, tomorrow we are shooting the wirework and I was like, (gasps) ‘Get me on a wire, show me how to do it!’ But they were like, ‘It’s too late, we are filming tomorrow. We need the stunt girl to do it because you can’t get hurt.’ And so I was having little pouts all the time, because I really wanted to do wirework. /Viva Press