For me there's a need for balance - fulfilling the sensitive side, letting my guard down, holding back the warrior in me. And I have to be vulnerable which is very hard for me to do.

Truthfully, I love being in the jungle. I love it when the make-up artists come to set, they come equipped with dirt and sweat. I spend my days climbing trees and I can crawl out of bed and walk on set and that's exactly all I have to look like.

I read every single letter. Some just break my heart. I've cried over letters that have come in, from young women and older women alike, saying to me, "You know, you made me want to stop crash dieting and just be healthy. You are my role model. I want to be like you."

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.

I just don't think that a lot of the time the messages we send kids prepare them for real life.

I cried myself to sleep wishing I was ugly because men leered and disrespected me, because they assumed things about my mental capacity or my physical willingness based on the way I look.

I got called and was told, "We'd like you to do The Hobbit", which was my favorite of all of them when I was a kid - "And we want you to play a character that's not in the books", I gulped and hesitated, but then I went, "These guys know this world, and they represent this world so well, that I actually think they've earned the right to have a little play."