My home is my castle, and I spend a lot of time nurturing it, redecorating - moving this and adjusting that, adding flowers and candles.

I am so glad that I get to maintain a relatively down-to-earth lifestyle.

I didn't grow up in a home that glorified Hollywood. We didn't watch TV. We didn't have a lot of magazines around.

I love being outside - that's where I'm the happiest.

One of the great pleasures of working in Middle Earth is you get to be another being.

I just like short hair on women, I think it's cool. And I have wanted to cut my hair for very many years, but being on contract with a television show for six years prevents you from doing that, and then being on contract with a cosmetic endorsement campaign prevents you from doing that again. So for eight years, I've had to have long, flowing locks. And I was just so sick and tired of long, flowing locks, so I chopped them.

I wasn't actually going to see the original film [Lord of the Ring], because I didn't think it was possible that a film could represent the books appropriately. So I was protesting, and I wasn't going to see them. And then my family all took a jaunt together, the entire family, to see the movies, and were like, "What, you're just going to stay home?" So I saw the movies and was thoroughly impressed that Peter Jackson managed to make my vision of the book come to life, as well as my sister's and my father's, and my aunt's and my uncle's, everyone's.