Evangeline Lilly opted for a natural birth at home when delivering her son last may.
“I actually skipped the hospital … We decided to have the baby at home because we wanted it to be a natural birth, and it turns out that it was 30 hours of natural,” Lilly told.
“Eight hours of pushing, that’s the part that men don’t understand. Women go, ‘Oh, dear, oh, dear God, eight hours of pushing?’ And the men are like, ‘Okay, eight hours of pushing.’”
Lilly’s midwife eventually stepped in to save the day.
“After about five hours of pushing, my midwife and my birthing assistant said, ‘You know, we have a few suggestions,’” she says. “And I was like, ‘Really? After five hours of pushing you have a few suggestions? You couldn’t have told me five minutes in?’”
Lilly planned to stay at home and stop working for a while, but things did not go exactly how she planned.
“I was sitting with my newborn baby and Peter Jackson called and said, ‘Would you like to be an elf in The Hobbit?’” she shares. “And I said, ‘Yes, I really do! I really do want to do that.’ So I’m sort of strapped in, as it turns out, to four movies now.”