Liv Tyler (AFP)

Paris, Dec. 9 (Reuters): For Hollywood star Liv Tyler, it’s tough being immortal.

“It must be such a drag being 3,000 years old. What a burden — the aching bones,” she said, reflecting on her role as the elf princess Arwen who lives forever in the latest Lord of the Rings movie.

“It was hard as an actor to get your head around these characters who are so perfect and wise,” she said of her part in the fantasy saga The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers that is being released worldwide on December 18.

“I feel very proud of the film,” she said of the second movie in a trilogy that brings to life the magical world of Middle Earth from J.R.R. Tolkien’s 20th century classic.

“It was hard to be an elf and to be in Tolkien’s world,” she told journalists on a promotional tour to Paris for the film’s European premiere.

Travelling the world to give the film a publicity boost has offered Tyler some intriguing contrasts. “New York audiences participate and cheer in the exciting bits. They get involved. In England, they are silent. Nobody talks.”

The three movies were filmed back-to-back in New Zealand over 18 months by director Peter Jackson. The giant project cost $300 million to film — and the first movie in the trilogy already made $860 million at the box office.

For much of the young cast making the movies, it was a real case of male bonding. They would travel around Asia together on their time off from shooting in New Zealand. But not Tyler. “When I wasn’t shooting, I would go home. I was kinda homesick. They were young and wild and wanted to check out the world.”

For Tyler, it is now time to move on and she confessed she would love to make a musical.

But the daughter of rubber-lipped Aerosmith frontman Steve Tyler and rock “supergroupie” Bebe Buell is not ready to give up the day job quite yet — even though she lives with Royston Langdon, lead singer with the group Spacehog.

“I have sung on a couple of my friends’ records and I do little fun things.

“But I would not know where to begin with writing a song. If you left me in a room with a guitar, I wouldn’t know what to do,” she confessed.

“When I was a kid, all I wanted to be was a singer. I didn’t know anything about acting because I grew up around musicians,” she said of her eccentric and bohemian upbringing.

She originally thought her father was rock star Todd Rundgren. “I didn’t get my lineage sorted out until I was 10,” she said of the discovery that Tyler was her dad.

As a teenager, Liv Tyler made a striking appearance in an Aerosmith video. One critic fondly recalled how she “memorably struggled in a war of containment with an insurgent silver brassiere”.

The music is still clearly very much in the genes.

“Luckily, I live with a musician and my dad is a musician,” she said.

And there is that one big acting ambition she would dearly love to fulfill.

“I have always wanted to be in a musical,” she said. “Sweet Charity is one of my favourites. I can’t wait to see Chicago when it comes out.”

For Frodo Baggins, The Fellowship of the Ring really did come true.

“Towards the end, the fellowship was a reality,” said Elijah Wood, the hobbit hero in the“Lord of the Rings” trilogy filmed back to back in New Zealand on a gruelling 18 month-schedule.

For the 21-year-old American, who first found fame as a child actor, it was an experience that changed his life forever.

The bond between the actors grew as strong as the on-screen ties between the diminutive hobbits fighting the forces of evil in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy classic.

“We worked together, we fought together for the film and helped each other,” he said on a promotional tour to Paris for the European premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.”