In the "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug," the second part of the "Hobbit" trilogy, Peter Jackson and his fellow screenwriters have expanded the scope of the original story in several ways. They've brought in elements from the "Lord of the Rings" appendices, making the story far more complex and dark than the source material. More controversially for some, they've created an entirely new character in the form of Tauriel, played by Canadian actress and "Lost" alumna Evangeline Lilly.
Except for the most orthodox or ornery of "Rings" fans, Tauriel's introduction is a welcome one, if only to provide a strong female voice to the otherwise all-male cast. Still, her character is no token addition to Tolkien's world -- she plays a critical role in expanding the world of the elves, a role that will continue through to the next film, where her story will be expanded upon even further.
Moviefone Canada sat down in Toronto with Lilly to discuss the role, the challenges of creating this new addition to the Middle-earth lore, and her own trepidation as a fan of the original works.
Moviefone: Was this story really missing a character like Tauriel? What do you think she brings to the film?
Evangeline Lilly: For me she brings the primarily female element of compassion into a book that is dominantly male. That softening, those moments in the film where she comes on-screen and you can feel that compassion and tenderness and vulnerability is a bit of a relief, because being in a man's world for nine hours running is pretty hard-hitting. There's a lot of ego and violence, and a lot of greed and selfish aims and desires, and to have a woman come in and be compassionate and vulnerable and fight for the vulnerable and the weak and the young is a breath of fresh air.
There is an explicit connection in this film between your healing prowess and Aragorn's in the first trilogy.
I am thrilled that anyone is making the connection between Tauriel and Aragorn, because he is a beloved character and one of my favourites. I was a bit concerned with that bit of the film because I didn't want anything to be too much of a repeat of what we had seen in "Rings," but what it came down to in the end was that Tolkien focused on the same theme, he made these...
...Echoes?
Yeah, Tolkien did have[these] echoes, and as a result we had to honour that. If we step too far outside of Tolkien we're all doing him a great disservice. [The filmmakers] were very collaborative and allowed me to be a big part of creating this character -- scenes, lines, everything. What was your own connection to "The Hobbit" prior to joining?
It was my favourite book as a little girl! The Sylvan Elves were my favourite characters, and I would fantasize at night lying awake in bed about being an elf living in the forest. I was a really woodsy little girl. One of the things that I regret in the film that I wanted to visually see was when the elves draw the dwarves off the path with their parties. As a kid I was like I want to be a Sylvan Elf and have drunken parties in the forest...
Well, you did grow up in British Columbia!
Exactly! When Peter came out with the first trilogy, I was the reluctant purist, I was the one saying I will not see these films, they are an abomination of Tolkien's work. My family made a Christmas family outing for the first film so I reluctantly went along. I was bowled over that somehow Peter had taken everybody's vision of what these books looked like, felt like, sounded like, and brought it to life on the screen. Ever since then, I've passed the torch onto him. Film is an adaptation; it's never a verbatim recounting of a book. As adaptations go, I think that was one of the most successful, and I don't mean box office sales, I mean artistically. It's one of the most successful adaptations I've ever seen.
Do you think because there was no Tauriel in the books, that gave you liberty? Or was there more pressure on you to convince people that you belonged to the story?
I kept continually saying, thank God I'm not playing Bilbo. That is so much pressure. Everyone had a specific idea in their heads of what Bilbo was supposed to look like. Personally, I think that Martin Freeman was perfectly cast and has absolutely exceeded anyone's expectations. I mean, he actually looks like [original Bilbo] Ian Holm. If you put their pictures together, you'd think it was the same person, but 20 or 40 years later. It was very fun having the liberty to just create because that is what we got to do, but create based on the master's work. But there was also the responsibility that if I dropped the ball, I would be the Jar Jar Binks of these films! [Laughs]
How did you then overcome the trepidation?
[Co-writers/producers] Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens had a lot of fantastic reasons why she should be in this film. When you introduce a group of characters on screen, if you don't introduce specific members of that group, nobody will care about that group. If you're at war and that group is losing, they are the dispensable people, it's only the people that you've been individually introduced to that you care about. Peter Jackson said that there is a three-minute window in a war scene, and if you don't see one of your primary characters within those three minutes, you will have completely lost your audience. They will have tuned out and won't care anymore.
Nine hours of a cinematic experience without one female character is subconsciously telling the female audience you are irrelevant, you're not important to storytelling, you don't have a place in heroic moments in history. It has a very damaging effect on the female psyche. We deal with that all the time in media. Women are always overlooked in the media and there are always these very powerful statistics about how if there's a woman in a film, she will only speak to men or only speak to women about men.
There's all of these strange things that have become a part of our storytelling, only because we are still entrenched in the old patriarchy that we were raised in and that we have come from and we have to break out of that. Tolkien was writing this book in the 1930s. It's understandable that he didn't include women. It's not understandable today to exclude women from a story that you're telling. I'm willing to take the heat if that means that little girls are going to come away from it believing that they can have an impact and that they are an important person.
Could talk about your interaction with the fan community and what that means to you as a performer, the obligations of living up to sometimes impossible expectations?
For a long time I was terrified of my fans, because they're very intense and they care a lot about what you're doing, and I wasn't taking what I was doing very seriously so it was all very imbalanced. Over the years, as time has gone by and things have calmed down a bit I've noticed that they're good to [me]. I'm a very critical audience member and I hold the bar really high. I want people to do that for me. I want something to jump for, I don't want it to be too easy. I think "Losties" and "Ringers" are all a lot of the same people. Hopefully that gives me a bit of a leg up playing a character that wasn't in the book, that some of the fans will already be fans of me.
What was your biggest surprise seeing the finished product?
You might be shocked to hear, but I was surprised how little action Tauriel saw! I know she's a severely action-oriented character and she's in a lot of battles, but when you're doing it, the amount of work that goes into one fight scene, it feels like it will just be fighting from the beginning to the end of the film, that she'll never have a moment to rest.
There are these tiny moments [of action] and you go, "What? That was 12 hours and a 20-pound weight and that's it?!" It's always unnerving when you realize how much work goes into two seconds of cinema entertainment. I'm curious now about the battle of the Five Armies [in the third film], because I literally spent myself on that. I did a week filming that battle alone and by the end of the week, the last two hours of filming on my last day, I was pushing vomit down. Every minute, I was on the verge of vomiting because I had physically pushed myself to the end of my limit.
"The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" opens in theatres on December 13.
from The Moviefone Blog http://news.moviefone.com/2013/12/12/evangeline-lilly-the-hobbit-tauriel-interview/
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