The 2014 role that saved Liv Tyler’s career: “Do I even want to be a part of it?”
It’s not unusual for an actor to reach a moment in their career when they question if they even want to be a part of the industry, a decision especially hard to navigate when you’ve grown up under the spotlight, and that’s the only world you’ve known.
This is something Liv Tyler can attest, having model and singer Bebe Buell as her mother and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith fame as his biological father (although she was raised to believe that Todd Rundgren was her father for the first 11 years of her life).
She grew up surrounded by famous figures, and it was only a matter of time before she’d enter the industry independently…well, sort of, because her first major job was an appearance in the ‘Crazy’ music video for her father’s band, starring alongside Alicia Silverstone. Nepotism rules the industry, though, so it’s hardly surprising that Tyler rose to prominence with the help of her father, but while she could’ve sat back and let her connections get her as far as she could with as little work as possible, she instead decided she was going to become a proper actor.
Roles in a few movies allowed her to find her footing in Hollywood, and while some of these left critics rather unimpressed, like Empire Records, these early efforts have since been viewed much more positively. Luckily, it was her role in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, beginning with 2001’s The Fellowship of the Ring, that really proved to be her ticket to mainstream success.
As Arwen, a particularly beloved character, Tyler earned acclaim, and her star power, of course, rose, while the movies became some of the highest-grossing pieces of cinema ever made. The actor has never come close to the success of these movies since, however, with her biggest movie roles following LOTR, arguably, standing as the horror movie The Strangers and The Incredible Hulk, both from 2008.
But the reason Tyler hasn’t crammed in lots of big projects since the early 2000s is that she was unsure of whether she wanted to continue in this industry. “I’d think, ‘Maybe I should just move to the country and open a store and write books and make music and have a million babies and take in animals’. Part of me always longed for it,” she admitted to The Guardian.
She added, “I’d look at the entertainment industry as a whole, and I’d think, ‘Where do I fit into all this, and do I even want to be a part of it?'” But just when she thought that it was the right time to step away from Hollywood for good, a role was offered to her that she couldn’t refuse, noting, “Then this came along, and it made everything worth waiting for”.
The role was in The Leftovers, a TV show which follows several characters in the wake of a mysterious global shift in which two per cent of the population disappears. Tyler auditioned for the part once her agents suggested it to her, and she even went as far as praying “to the universe to show me a sign, that if the project happened, it was a sign that I was meant to keep acting”.
She was lucky enough to bag the part, and Tyler felt her love for acting returning. She hadn’t acted in two years, not since Robot and Frank, but this was clearly the long-lasting project she needed. She starred in 13 of the 28 episodes, with the show receiving high acclaim. Evidently, all she needed was a project that inspired her excitement again, and to her relief, she found that in The Leftovers.
