It took the chance to fulfill a childhood fanstasy to tempt Evangeline Lilly[1] out of retirement.
The actress had dreamed of being an elf as a little girl every time she read her favorite book, “The Hobbit.” While the “Lost” refugee had cast herself away in Hawaii in mid-2011 determined to abandon acting to raise her son, Kahekili, she told her agents not to bother with pitches.
But director Peter Jackson[2] managed to track down her phone number, offering her a starring role as an elf in “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” opening Friday.
“I was in mommyland, I was a month out of giving birth when they called to offer me this role,” the 34-year-old actress tells the Daily News.
“I can’t imagine anything else could have made me go back to work when I did.”
So Lilly moved to New Zealand to join the cast of “The Desolation of Smaug,” the second film in Jackson’s “Hobbit” prequel trilogy to “The Lord of the Rings.”
She plays the Elvish warrior Tauriel, a character not in the original J.R.R. Tolkien saga, but a major new potential ally to Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and his band of dwarves, as well as a potential love interest for Orlando Bloom’s elf, Legolas.
Lilly’s casting has been a lightning rod of controversy among her fellow Tolkien nerds since the character isn’t in the books — but was added by Jackson to adjust the tremendous testosterone level of the original book.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Lee Pace as Thranduil in director Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”
“I think it is kind of fascinating that it was my favorite book given that there aren’t any female characters in it for me to gravitate towards,” says the Canadian actress. “That a young girl wouldn’t even notice because she’s so accustomed to seeing and hearing stories about men and boys that she wouldn’t even expect that a female should be in a storybook that she’s reading.
“That’s one of the main reasons that this character had to be created in this adaptation. This is 2013, somewhere you have to draw a line in the sand.”
So Lilly was determined to make her Tauriel an especially formidable warrior.
“There was a moment on set — exactly one moment and I filmed for a year — when I felt like the badass I was supposed to be,” she sighed. "Otherwise, I just felt like a bumbling idiot and I just hoped that everything would turn out all right on the big screen when Peter was done with it.”
Particularly irksome was the monstrosity of a red wig Lilly had to wear that she estimates weighed 20 pounds.
“The wig was incredibly painful when I had to do my stunts,” she says. “It also gets caught in everything. I would get my weapons caught in my hair, I would get orcs caught in my hair, I would get props caught in my hair, it was really hazardous.”
To find his Elven King Thranduil, Jackson had to trek even further from Middle Earth — all the way to New York.
After seeing Lee Pace[3] ’s turn in 2006’s “The Fall,” the director traveled to the other side of the globe to recruit the Juilliard-educated actor.
Mark Pokorny/Warner Bros. Pictures
Director Peter Jackson (center) with Lee Pace (l.) and Evangeline Lilly on the set of “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”
They didn’t have to pitch Pace very hard to join a cast that included one of his idols, Sir Ian McKellen, who plays the wizard Gandalf.
“Even when I was in high school drama [class], I would see theater books and there would be pictures of him playing Macbeth opposite Judi Dench,” says Pace. “And I remember looking at them going I wonder what they must be like in person.”
To get into the proper regal mood for his character, Pace would stare at the image of artist Damien Hirst’s famed “For the Love of God” diamond skull sculpture on his iPhone.
By the time Pace’s plane landed in New Zealand, he was ready to assume the throne as the father of Legolas (though Pace, 34, is actually two years younger than Bloom) in “The Desolation of Smaug.”
Pace has called the Big Apple home since he migrated from Texas as a teen.
“I remember being like 17 and I had never been in New York before and I was taking a taxi from LaGuardia down to Lincoln Center where Juilliard is, looking out the window and thinking that it looked like Sesame Street,” he says.
And after a spate of work that took him away from the city for more than a year — including filming Marvel Studios’ upcoming “Guardians of the Galaxy” — Pace is finally home.
What’s the first thing he did upon returning?
“My laundry.”
References
- ^ Evangeline Lilly (www.nydailynews.com)
- ^ Peter Jackson (www.nydailynews.com)
- ^ Lee Pace (www.nydailynews.com)
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