Evangeline Lilly Nicole Evangeline Lilly is a Canadian actress
best known for her role as Kate Austen in ABC's Lost, a role for which she won multiple
Saturn Awards and Teen Choice Awards and a Golden Globe nomination. Lilly is also known
for her roles in the feature films Afterwards, The Hurt Locker, and Real Steel. Lilly appeared
in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and will appear in The Hobbit: The Battle of the
Five Armies, the final film in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy.
Personal life Evangeline Lilly was born in Fort Saskatchewan,
Alberta, and raised in British Columbia by her mother and her father, a produce manager.
She graduated from W. J. Mouat Secondary School in Abbotsford, British Columbia, where she
played soccer and was vice president of the student council. She speaks fluent French.
While in college, Lilly worked as a flight attendant for Royal Airlines, as a waitress,
and as a mechanic to pay for her tuition. Her acting career began when she was discovered
walking the streets of Kelowna, British Columbia, by a Ford Modeling Agency agent. Lilly took
the card but did not immediately pursue acting. She eventually called and the agency landed
her several roles in commercials and non-speaking parts in the TV shows Smallville and Kingdom
Hospital and the film The Lizzie McGuire Movie. On December 20, 2006, an electrical problem
set fire to Lilly's house in Kailua, Hawaii, destroying the house and all of her possessions
while she was on the set of Lost. Though she lost all she owned, Lilly said the fire "was
almost liberating. I'm in no hurry to clutter up my life again."
Lilly was previously married to Canadian hockey player Murray Hone. From 2004 to 2009, she
dated Lost co-star Dominic Monaghan. She had her first child, a son named Kahekili (Hawaiian
for "the thunder"), with partner Norman Kali in Hawaii in May 2011.
Philanthropy Lilly grew up Christian and her faith influenced
her decision to take part in a three-week mission trip to the Philippines when she was
18. Her interest in humanitarian causes and global development led her to major in International
Relations at the University of British Columbia. Lilly continues to work with nonprofits such
as the GO Campaign. In 2009, Lilly auctioned off custom lingerie in support of Task Brasil,
"a non-profit organization dedicated to helping the lost street children of Brazil by providing
them secure housing." In 2010, she auctioned off three lunches in Vancouver, Honolulu,
and Los Angeles to help widows and orphans in Rwanda, a country Lilly has made numerous
trips to as part of her charity work. In 2012 Lilly auctioned off a Hawaiian hike to raise
money for Sierra Club. After shooting the final episode of Lost,
Lilly said she was considering taking a break from acting to focus on her charity and humanitarian
efforts. She told Vulture, "I consider acting a day job — it's not my dream; it's not
my be-all, end-all." She has claimed to use her actress earnings to further her humanitarian
efforts, not the other way around. Lost
Lilly was encouraged to try out for Lost by a friend and she did not expect to get cast.
As the secrecy campaign made the auditioning actors not have access to the full script,
reading short scenes and only knowing the basic premise of people surviving a plane
crash on a tropical island - which reminded Lilly of The Blue Lagoon - she even thought
Lost would "at best be a mediocre TV show". Around 75 women auditioned for the part of
Kate Austen. Damon Lindelof, writer and co-creator, said he and J. J. Abrams, executive producer
and co-creator, "were fast-forwarding through a tape, and he saw her and said, 'That's the
girl.'" The character almost had to be recast, as Lilly had trouble acquiring a work visa
to enter the United States. Her application was finally accepted after nearly 20 tries
and she arrived in Hawaii for filming one day late.
Lost ran for six seasons, airing from 2004–2010. It was one of the top shows on ABC's primetime
schedule during its run, won a Golden Globe and 11 Prime Time Emmy Awards including best
drama in 2005, and was ranked the top-rated TV show of the decade (2002-2012) by IMDB.
Lilly appeared in 116 of the show's 121 episodes, and her character, Kate Austen, was the show's
female lead. Entertainment Weekly voted Lilly one of its "Breakout Stars of 2004." In 2006,
she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Lead Actress-Drama. Robert Bianco of USA Today
praised Lilly's performance in "Eggtown," saying that it was almost worthy of a Primetime
Emmy Award nomination. In 2007, Lilly's portrayal was voted #1 Sexiest Woman on Television by
TV Guide and made FHM's Top Sexiest. Action figures of Lilly's Lost character were
released during the holiday season of 2006. Film career
In 2008, Lilly starred in the Academy Award-winning film The Hurt Locker. She and the rest of
the cast won the Gotham Award for Best Ensemble Cast and the Washington D.C. Area Film Critics
Association Award for Best Ensemble. Lilly followed her role in The Hurt Locker with
a leading part opposite John Malkovich in Afterwards, a psychological thriller directed
by Gilles Bourdos. In 2010, Lilly stated her intention to focus
on children's book writing and on feature film roles. On May 11, 2010, Lilly announced
on The View that she places writing and being a mother as top priorities, but she likes
acting as a day job and she will continue acting when possible.
In 2011, Lilly appeared as Bailey Tallet in Real Steel alongside Hugh Jackman. Despite
having turned down a number of movie offers, she traveled to Los Angeles to acquire the
part a few days after director Shawn Levy sent her the script. Levy said he cast her
because Lilly is "magnificent to look at, she's soulful, and she's sexy with Hugh. I
needed someone who you believed had grown up in a man's world. Bailey needed to have
a strength and a toughness that was not at the expense of her being womanly."
In 2012, Lilly was cast to play the role of the Mirkwood elf Tauriel in Peter Jackson's
three-part adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. The character, which does not
appear in the original book by Tolkien, was created by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh as
the head of the Elven guard who, like Legolas (who also appears in the film), wields a bow
and two daggers as weapons. Lilly, who had been a fan of Tolkien's books since she was
13, underwent training for swordplay and archery, as well as in the Elvish language for the
role. In March 2014, Lilly was cast in a female lead role in upcoming superhero film Ant-Man.
Literature In June 2010, Lilly announced on The Late
Late Show with Craig Ferguson that she would be writing a children's book, reciting some
of the story from the book to Ferguson on the show.
On July 18, 2013, Lilly debuted the book, entitled The Squickerwonkers. The release
event was held at the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con International, where she attended a book signing
for the work in addition to providing a reading performance. Lilly has stated that the idea
for the book first came to her when she was fourteen years old. The foreword to the book
was written by director Peter Jackson. She described the work as "a graphic series designed
for children", stating that the book is about a young girl who joins a group of characters
she described as "this family, the Squickerwonkers, and they're strange outcasts who all have
very particular vices". She has stated that future books will each reveal a new Squickerwonker
character and unique vice, which will eventually become the undoing of the character. The illustrator
for the book is Johnny Fraser-Allen of Weta Workshop, a New Zealand-based concept design
firm that worked on films, including The Hobbit. Lilly stated that the goal was to "make a
book that we would like to have read as children and that we would still enjoy as adults today".
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