Evangeline Lilly at the World Premiere of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in London. (Photo credit: Staff Reporter Evie Bowman)
Last November, BuzzFeed interviewed Evangeline Lilly at the end of her promotional tour for The Squickerwonkers.
She told how her first children’s book was born when she was just 14 years old and talked about her eary life until her first job as actress in Lost. “I figured out I really hated working as an actress, and I was like, Well, then, what do I want to do if I don’t want to be an actress? Because I didn’t really mean to become an actress. I was sort of an accidental actress.”
Once Lost was over, Evangeline didn’t want to work as actress again, she wanted to be a writer, but then Peter Jackson asked her to portray Tauriel the Elf in his Hobbit adaptation, a character created just for her by Peter Jackson, “Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Guillermo del Toro specifically to give The Hobbit the strong, independent female character that was lacking in J.R.R. Tolkien’s original novel.”
“I just thought, ‘OK, well, either take it, and accept that you’ll probably always be lured back and find a way to come to terms with it, or say no and really just walk away, and make it real. So, obviously, I did the former.” said Lilly. Thanks to The Hobbit, Evangeline met one of the visual artists of Weta Workshop, Johnny Fraser-Allen, and together teamed up to realize the first two books of Lilly’s The Squickerwonkers saga, realizing her desire to become a professional writer.
When Evangeline thought to have finally quit acting, she has been cast for a female lead in Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man. After several changes of mind, she signed the contract and shot the movie.
“As for Lilly’s future, she has no other acting gigs on her immediate horizon, which is fine with her. ‘I call it my day job,’ she says of acting. ‘You know, it pays the bills. It’s a great job. I’m grateful for it. But it’s not my passion.’”
“There are so many reasons why, for me, writing is superior to acting,” she says. “One of them is anonymity. Writers can live relatively normal lives. Most [working] actors can’t. Writers can work from home and be near their family most of the time. Actors usually can’t. Writers expend a lot of intellectual energy, but not so much emotional energy. And I have intellectual energy coming out of my yin-yang, but emotional energy — I am so lazy. I just don’t have a lot of emotional energy to give. I don’t like drama in my life, and I don’t like having to pretend [to have drama].”
You can read the full interview with Evangeline Lilly on BuzzFeed.
