“Something we didn’t really tell the audience, but I knew in my own heart and mind, was that in her back story, Tauriel was orphaned when she was a young, young elf. She’s still a young elf — she’s only 600 — but at some point in her life, she was orphaned, and her parents were killed at the hands of an orc, or orcs (I’m not sure how many). And that influenced … her attitude, her demeanor, her presence, her coldness, the anger that sort of seethed out of her was this need for revenge, this need for justice, this need to make things right in a world that had wronged her. And then as Kili enters her world, he opens up her heart and mind and her soul to the notion of innocence again. She sees innocence and purity in him, and she sees a spark of life that she hasn’t known since before her parents were killed, and it reminds her of the young elf that she maybe threw aside in her pain. In a weird way, it’s a coming-of-age story, and yet when we come of age, if we do it with grace, then I think in a way we return to some of the innocence that we held in childhood. In our maturing and our wisdom, we realize the infinite wisdom that children have in their idealism and in their passions. So I think it’s a beautiful arc for the character, and I was very excited to play it.”