Former "Lost" star Evangeline Lilly makes no secret of her love for fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien's work, but in taking on the role of warrior wood elf Tauriel in "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug," the Alberta-born actress had a very serious concern.

“It was very, very fun having the liberty to just create, and that's what we got to do, and create based on [Tolkien]’s work,” Lilly told reporters in Toronto last week. “But, there was also the responsibility that, if I dropped the ball, I would be the Jar Jar Binks of these films.”

In "The Desolation of Smaug" (in theatres Dec. 13), Tauriel helps Bilbo and the dwarves on their quest to retake the Lonely Mountain from the titular dragon. A close ally of bow-crazy elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom), Lilly’s character was created specifically for the film and does not appear in any of Tolkien’s work -- a fact that afforded the actress a great deal of freedom, but also dded a whole lot of stress.

“I kept continually saying ‘Thank God I'm not playing Bilbo,’ because that is so much pressure,” the actress admitted. “Everyone had a very specific idea in their heads of what Bilbo was supposed to look like. Personally, I think Martin Freeman was perfectly cast and has absolutely exceeded anyone's expectations.”

The 34-year-old actress, who counts “The Hobbit” among her favourite childhood books, said that despite Tauriel’s absence in the books and largely supporting role in “The Desolation of Smaug,” the character is integral to making the overall experience more accessible for audiences.

“There are innumerable good reasons for her to be in this film,” Lilly said. “The first one is that she brings what I would call the primarily female element of compassion into a book that is dominantly male . . . There's a lot of ego and there's a lot of violence and a lot of greed and selfish aims and selfish desires.”

There is also the fact that an entire trilogy exclusively full of men would send a signal to viewers that "The Hobbit" movies are a "boys only" experience.

“Nine hours of cinema entertainment without one female character, essentially, sort of subconsciously, is telling the female audience, 'You are irrelevant. You're not important to storytelling. You don't have a place in heroic moments in history,'" she said. "It has a very damaging effect on the female psyche and we deal with that all the time in media. We have to break out of that."

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Lilly said she can understand why a character like Tauriel wasn't present in Tolkien's original novel (though the author likely would have added female characters to the revised edition he was planning to release after "The Lord of the Rings" books were published), but she believes that slavishly adapting the story and not including women would have been a mistake.

“Tolkien was writing this book in the 1930s, so it's understandable that he didn't include women,” Lilly explained. “It's not understandable, today, to exclude women from a story that you're telling, and I think that I'm willing to take the heat if that means that little girls are going to come away from it believing they can have an impact and that they are an important person.”

“The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” arrives in theatres on Dec. 13.