Casting Evangeline Lilly as an elf in The Hobbit is kind of like hiring a younger version of Liv Tyler to play some sort of alternate version of Arwen. Except Evangeline is playing a character who actually isn’t in Tolkien’s books, she’s some new creation cooked up by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, probably to add a female element to a story which otherwise has none.
As a Tolkien fan, you should be fine with this. Not just because Jackson and Walsh have by now earned everyone’s trust, but because Evangeline is kind of perfect to play an elf. Don’t believe me? Watch her speaking Elvish in an interview with Access Hollywood.
She seems perfect. This reminds me of the first videos we got of Liv Tyler, now more than a decade ago, trying out her Elvish words to interested reporters. Oddly enough, even after Lord of the Rings, the reporters doing these interviews still seem to have no idea what they’re talking about. The one in this video is such a sci-fi geek she doesn’t even know The Hobbit is fantasy, not science fiction. Hot girls pretending to be geeks is so over.
