Evangeline Lilly Talks Tauriel and the Final Hobbit Film

In an interview with LA Times, The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies' Evangeline Lilly discusses her role of Tauriel, what she brought to the role, and some of her favorite moments on the set. Below are a few of the questions but the full interview is at Hero Complex.

HC: Why do you think people have embraced her so warmly, especially after some rather critical responses at the outset?
EL: I give credit for that completely to Peter, Fran and Philippa. I think they handled the creation of this character with kid gloves. They handled it with such care, with such stealth and with such respect to the fans. I think one of the biggest mistakes would have been to have suddenly made this trilogy of films about a bunch of elves, and they really didn’t do that. As a big fan of Tolkien and as a huge fan of “The Hobbit,” personally I was greatly relieved to see how little I was in the film. And usually as an actor, you’re really hoping you’ll be in the movie as much as possible, and you know, you want to see your character thrive. But as a fan, I wanted to see my character in the movies about as much as she was. I just felt like it was enough time to establish a believable, convincing, relatable and emotional character without letting her, or any of the other elves for that matter, take center stage, away from Bilbo and the dwarfs and their story. I think Peter, Phil and Fran handled that with all the characters very well. You never saw Bard too much, you never saw the elves too much, you never saw Beorn too much. We were all there to support the story of the dwarfs.

HC: How much input did you get to have in Tauriel’s development as a character?
EL: Frankly, a lot. I was so blessed to have been given, I don’t want to say carte blanche, but they invited me into their creative hub, and we created Tauriel together. That was the best gift a filmmaker could have ever given me — the generosity of spirit it takes to allow an actor to really have a hand in creating their character, and to not keep that from them as sort of a guardian or key-keeper. It’s kind of changed my mind about acting. I had always found acting to be a frustrating profession, then all of a sudden, these incredible creative geniuses brought me into their foray, and they allowed me to be a part of a beautiful creation, a beautiful character. There was so much reward in that, that a new window was opened to acting for me where I had a great sense of professional and creative satisfaction in playing this character, and it really sort of changed my mind about my career.