‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’ Tauriel Is The Ultimate Female Elf; Evangeline Lilly Is A Die-Hard Tolkien Fan

Evangeline Lilly, best known for her "Lost" role is now a part of the Tolkien Universe via "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug."

Her role is Tauriel, a character that is not in the book, but Peter Jackson has exercised some creative freedom for the movie. In an interview with Collider, Lilly described her character and shares her thoughts on joining the legendary franchise:

On Tauriel and her origin: "(Peter Jackson and the writers have) taken elements of different female Elven characters throughout Tolkien's work, and they have amalgamated those things into one character, which is Tauriel. She becomes sort of the embodiment and representation of the Wood Elves, which Tolkien talks about at length in all of his books. And in this book in particular, he just doesn't introduce you to any of them. Well, you can't have a movie with a group of people that are significant players in the story, that push forward the plot, without introducing at least one or two of them. You have to meet them. So I think that they just recognized that."

On how different Tauriel is from the other elves: "My character is different from all of the Elves you've met before, in that she's really young. And I keep telling journalists this because I've really focused on that in my performance. I'm trying to distinguish her from all of these incredibly sage and wise Elves that have lived for thousands of years. She's only six hundred years old, she's just a baby. So she's a bit more impulsive, and she's a bit more immature. I think she's more easily romanticized by a lot of things."

Was she familiar with the material and the fact that her character is not in the book? : "..that is the greatest source of my anxiety on this film, is that I'm going to be lynched. I was a die-hard fan of these books before the films ever came out. And when I say die-hard, I wasn't the person who could speak Elvish, but I really loved them. And I wasn't actually going to see the original films, because I didn't think it was possible that a film could represent the books appropriately. So I was protesting, and I wasn't going to see them. And then my family all took a jaunt together, the entire family, to see the movies, and were like, "What, you're just going to stay home?" So I saw the movies and was thoroughly impressed that Peter Jackson managed to make my vision of the book come to life, as well as my sister's and my father's, and my aunt's and my uncle's, everyone's. It seemed to somehow pan across everyone's vision, even though we all knew we had to have had different visions of the books."

Get to know more about Tauriel on December 13 when the movie opens.