If you ask Evangeline Lilly, she loves nothing more than getting lost in Middle-earth.
At Monday night's Los Angeles premiere of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the 34-year-old actress was grinning ear to ear about what she considered the role of a lifetime, playing the Silvan Elf, Tauriel, in director Peter Jackson's second installment in his big-screen trilogy adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's famed novel.
"It feels surprising and overwhelming and exciting," Lilly told E! News from the red carpet about getting the call to join the production. "I was a massive Tolkien fan. The Hobbit was…my favorite book as a little girl and the Silvan Elves were my favorite characters in the book. I had fantasized about being a Silvan Elf when I was a little girl so this is a dream come true."
Despite Tauriel never actually appearing in Tolkien's epic tome, the filmmaker added her to the mix to help flesh out the elves of the Mirkwood Forest whom Bilbo Baggins and his band of dwarves encounter on their quest to the Lonely Mountain and to feature another female character in the mainly male-dominated story.
And that was perfectly fine by this Lost star who had to don a big red wig for Tauriel, who's the head of the Elven guard and has a good number of scenes with Legolas, the Elven prince from Jackson's Lord of the Rings films once again played by Orlando Bloom. It's a role she said weighed on her quite literally.
"That wig is so heavy. I would get such a headache wearing that wig," Lilly added.
While Evangeline relished her stint wearing those prosthetic Elven ears, costar Martin Freeman, who plays Bilbo, revealed to E! News that he actually took home some prosthetic ears of his own from the set and gave them away as gifts.
For a cinematic occasion such as this, we're not too surprised.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, hits theaters on Dec. 13.