Evangeline Lilly shares her experience of natural birth

The Real Steel star, 32, chose a home birth when she delivered her son on May 22.

“I actually skipped the hospital,” she revealed in the interview. “We decided to have the baby at home because we wanted it to be a natural birth, and it turns out that it was 30 hours of natural.”

“Eight hours of pushing, that’s the part that men don’t understand. Women go, ‘Oh, dear, oh, dear God, eight hours of pushing?’ And the men are like, ‘Okay, eight hours of pushing.’”

Fortunately for the actress, her midwife finally intervened.

“After about five hours of pushing, my midwife and my birthing assistant said, ‘You know, we have a few suggestions,’” she recounted. “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, who admitted she wants to have a “brood” of babies, said she initially planned to “abandon ship for a little while,” but her plans were compromised.

For good reason, the Canadian actress couldn’t say no to an offer from Peter Jackson.

“I was sitting with my newborn baby and Peter Jackson called and said, ‘Would you like to be an elf in The Hobbit?’” she told Leno. “And I said, ‘Yes, I really do! I really do want to do that.’ So I’m sort of strapped in, as it turns out, to four movies now.”

Fortunately, her work doesn’t keep her away from her newborn as he is brought to her on set.

“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 shared.

“And 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!”‘”