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When Evangeline Lilly gave birth to her son in May, she knew she wanted to have a natural birth -- so she "skipped the hospital" and decided to have the baby at home instead. But as the 32-year-old Lost and Real Steel star revealed last week on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, she didn't realize that the process was going to be "30 hours of natural."
Not surprisingly, Lilly told Jay Leno that the eight hours of pushing wasn't exactly the most thrilling aspect of her pregnancy. Fortunately, Lilly's midwife stepped in part way through the labor to give her some more pointers. Watch an excerpt from the interview below.
"After about five hours of pushing, my midwife and my birthing assistant said, 'You know, we have a few suggestions,'" Lilly recalled. "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's original plan was to take some time off after her pregnancy to spend time with her son, and hopefully work on her planned "brood" of babies. But then she received an offer she couldn't refuse.
Only a short while after Lilly gave birth to her son, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson called her up to ask if she wanted to play an elf in his upcoming adaptation of The Hobbit. The self-professed nerd immediately said yes and, as she puts it, is "strapped in, as it turns out, to four movies now."
Fortunately, Lilly's son spends plenty of time with her on set, even if he doesn't realize that he's hanging out with his mother.
"He came to the trailer and I put him to my breast (to nurse), and he screamed his head off, staring up at this strange, pointy-eared, mess of a person that was not his mother," she said with a laugh. "Then that night I was feeding him at home and he was perfectly fine, and my partner (Norman Kali) said to me, 'You know his internal dialogue right now is, "Mom, you won't believe what happened to me today!"'"
