Luke, in playing Bard you got to use a bit of your native accent. What else about him did you identify with and what was the most fun part about playing him?
Luke Evans: Well, having my own accent was very special. I love the gift that Peter, Fran and Phil gave to me. It was the first time I’ve ever used my own accent in a movie and probably the last. But it was very nice because it freed up my own…who I am, you know, and my heritage and my personality was very much part of Bard.
It did do something very different to the character. My performance was different because of the fact that I was speaking with my own accent. I was Welsh and part of the other people in Laketown, some of them are Welsh as well and I have an affinity with them because we all have common ancestry and all of that stuff. It all sort of paid off.
It’s difficult to talk about everything because we have another film that’s coming out next year and we all play a very big part in the next film as well and I can’t talk about that, but it was a lot of fun.
As you can see, I’m often either being chased or chums are trying to lock me up or something’s always happening in Bard’s life. It was a fantastic set to work on. It was just so expansive and real and you can keep walking and walking and turning corners and you’d never come to the end of it, which was brilliant. It was really great. Really, really great.
Peter, did all the dwarves make you a sexy calendar and gave it to you as a gift? And if so, what was your reaction to that?
Peter Jackson: Why exactly do you want this information? (Laughs)
Just to put some color in the story.
Peter Jackson: They did. Look, they tried to make me a sexy calendar and failed, quite badly. They thought they were making a sexy calendar.
Dean and Aidan, anything to add to this?
Aidan Turner: I want to know where the calendar is. Where’s the calendar hanging up?
Dean O’Gorman: There is only one of them. Only one was made like the ring so I want to know where it is. Peter, where is it?
Peter Jackson: EBay.
Aidan Turner: And it’s very sexy! We all posed. I don’t want to give too much away because it is a bit secretive but we did pose as naked dwarves which meant that all of us were in our…
Dean O’Gorman: We had fat suits on which from a distance look like we were naked.
Aidan Turner: What was our pose? I think we did a tango pose and I might have had a rose in my mouth.
Dean O’Gorman: I think Aidan was dipping me.
Peter Jackson: You’re giving too much information.
Aidan Turner: Sorry Peter. Case closed.
Evangeline, we read that you are ready to retire. You just had a little baby when this came to you and it sort of changed your life. Can you talk about that? It seems like such a crazy idea. Also, about the character of Tauriel, how do you see her exactly having this longing for a dwarf? And for Peter and for Philippa, there has been some controversy for creating a character that wasn’t in Tolkien’s book. How did you handle that?
Evangeline Lilly: Retirement, yeah. What’s so strange about retiring at 30? I think that’s most people’s dream. I had retired into what I thought would be a life of quite motherhood and writing and didn’t really plan on taking any more acting gigs. It had been about at least five years since I had taken a meeting or engaged in a new project. I just was sort of off the grid so to speak.
I was so far off the grid that when Pete, Fran and Phil were trying to find me to get ahold of me about this role, they couldn’t reach me and somebody on their production team just coincidentally used to work with my partner, so he got a text message one day saying, “Peter Jackson is trying reach Evangeline. Do you think she might be able to pick up the phone please?” So they did eventually get ahold of me and of course because The Hobbit was my favorite book as a little girl and the Sylvan elves were my favorite characters in the book and it would be a dream come true to play one, I jumped at the opportunity.
I picked up the phone very quickly. And then they said, your character is not in the book and I took great pause as a great fan of Tolkien. I kind of gulped and went, “Waaaaa…what? Everyone is going to hate me.” And it didn’t take long for them to completely convince me that it was the right thing to do and it was a good idea.
Philippa Boyens: I remember that phone call and I remember that moment where I said, “And the love story.” You know, there was this moment… it’s not a conventional love story and you were like, “Right, okay and um with a dwarf.” And there was silence, and then I went, “Really, but hang on I’m going to send you his photo, it’s Aidan Turner, so it’s okay!”
Evangeline Lilly: She did!
Philippa Boyens: I did and then you went, “Okay, I can handle that.”
Evangeline Lilly: She did. She goes, “He is soooo handsome.” But also at that moment when she said there’s a love story, and you guys might not remember this, Phil might not remember this, but I agreed to the job under one condition, and they agreed to the condition and that condition was in place for two years. The condition was I will not be involved in a love triangle. Right? Because any of you who were fans of Lost, I’ve had it up to here with love triangles and sure enough I come back for re-shoots in 2012 and they go, “We’ve made a few adjustments to the love story.”
It’s great that you have this idea of having to convince your actors that their plot lines are okay. Is that something you have to do a lot?
Philippa Boyens: With Tauriel, Evangeline is not joking. She is a huge Tolkien fan. She was concerned and we understood that, but we did explain where some of that came from the relationship between Gimli and Galadriel. That was a kind of a very pure but sort of interesting love and also the idea that the feminine energy was lacking because professor Tolkien actually wrote fantastic female characters, he just didn’t write one for The Hobbit, and Evangeline understood that immediately and she was brave.
Evangeline Lilly: And I think to his defense, Tolkien was writing in 1937. You know, the world is a different place today and I keep repeatedly telling people that in this day and age to put nine hours of cinema entertainment in the theaters for young girls to go and watch and not have one female character is subliminally telling them you don’t count, you’re not important and you’re not pivotal to story. And I just think that they were very brave and very right in saying we won’t do that to the young female audience who come and watch our film. And not just the young female audience but even a woman of my own age, I think it’s time that we stop making stories that are only about men, especially only about heroic men, and I love that they made Tauriel a hero.
