Lost youth
As season two of the scarily addictive Lost crashes on to Dubai’s shores, the island’s siren, Evangeline Lilly talks about trust issues, job swapping and revealing the real Kate Austen. Interview Michelle Byrne.
Whether she is climbing trees, carting around explosives, hunting boar or delivering a baby, Evangeline Lilly’s Kate Austen is more than just a pretty face – or lithe body for that matter. From the opening episode in the phenomenally popular Lost we have watched the small screen bad girl sew up a co-star, head-butt a potential suitor, and be shot at by armed police, without giving a second thought to the sweat, blood and tears soaking her limited wardrobe. Whether you see her as a modern feminist role model or a manipulative femme fatale, the actress leaves little room for interpretation when she describes her role as the island’s wanted woman as nothing short of her ‘dream job’.
‘I think it’s the role to play if you’re an actress on television right now,’ she says with conviction. ‘I look around and wonder if I’d swap positions with any female actor, and there’s nobody. I want my role. I want Kate.’ And who can blame her? From the flare-wearing Charlie’s Angels catching bad guys back in the 70s, to Buffy’s vampire slaying antics entertaining us throughout the 90s, right up until Sydney Bristow’s current sideline in espionage in Alias, Kate Austen joins the A-list league of ass kicking heroines not wasting a second waiting to be swept off their pedicured feet a la Sex And The City or whipping up a soufflé on Wisteria Lane. She is the action-packed character women want to be and – especially after the scene where she peels off a pair of skin tight jeans for a swim in her underwear – men want to be with.
Since Oceanic Flight 815 from Sydney to Los Angeles crashed on a seemingly inhabited island, Kate and Lost’s other 47 survivors have captured a dedicatedly unique following around the globe. Speaking about her first major acting role, the 27-year-old Canadian tells Time Out: ‘My teachers are my fellow cast members. I have learnt so much from them from the very first day onset. I can probably take you through and break down every member of the cast and tell you the things I have stolen from them.’ But she admits despite living on the sun-drenched Hawaiian island of Oahu for nine months a year, life under the lens isn’t always easy: ‘One of the first scenes that I did with Matthew [Fox] was the scene where I sew up his back. I was so taken aback by his ability to bare his soul the moment they called “action” that it took me take after take after take. We ended up doing nearly 50 takes and had to come back the next day to finish the scene,’ she confides. She also confesses she is uneasy with the fame attached to her role on one of television’s most popular shows. Despite brimming schoolgirl enthusiasm she admits: ‘Last summer I wanted to go somewhere to be at rest and be away from it all. And I had to go to Rwanda because I tried four different continents and eight different countries and everyone knew the show.
’Lilly’s Kate is a central character in the perfectly constructed ensemble cast – with each member masterfully portraying the passengers’ past, the ubiquitous skeletons in their closet, how they came to be on the ill-fated flight, as well as the roles they have inherited on the island. Kate is cynical, fiercely independent, and shrouded in mystery, while Dr Jack Shepard (Matthew Fox), the unspoken leader of the group, is tormented by his past relationship with his dead father. Charlie Pace (Dominic Monaghan) is the burnt-out rock star with a drug addiction and Claire Littleton (Emilie de Ravin) is pregnant when boarding the plane having been warned not to give up her unborn child by a psychic. James Sawyer (Josh Holloway) is the island’s cute conman, while Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews) is the dexterous technical-genius and a former member of Iraq’s Royal Guard. The overweight lottery winner, Hurley Reyes (Jorge Garcia), provides much of the show’s comic relief, while slightly scary hunter-gatherer John Locke (Terry O’Quinn) was a paraplegic who miraculously regained the use of his legs after the plane crash.
With the island setting of Survivor, the supernatural secrecy of the X-Files, the nail-biting suspense of 24, and a good looking cast reminiscent of, dare we say it, The OC – Lost has fanatical followers tuning in week on week, desperate to unravel its many riddles, mysteries, subplots, and secrets. But frustratingly the freshman finale proved only to pose more questions rather than solutions. Rose (L. Scott Caldwell) claims that her husband didn’t die in the crash, there is a plane stuffed with heroin, a slave ship filled with skeletons, wild polar bears, and whispering in the jungle perhaps caused by ‘the others’ who apparently materialised (ragged, bearded, and looking like something out of Deliverance) to kidnap 10-year-old Walt (played by Malcolm David Kelley). The deafening, shadowy monster described as the ‘security system’ is still inexplicably rustling in the trees, the significance of the reoccurring number sequence that won Hurley his jackpot is still absent, and now the hatch is blown wide open, the audience is left wondering just what can be down the shaft?
‘It’s hard, really hard,’ Lilly says of the maze of plot twists and turns she has to meander through on camera. ‘The director will say “Just trust me. Two or three episodes down the line you will know why Kate is saying what she’s saying”. And that’s it. That’s all I get. And I’m ready to pull my hair out. Sometimes I settle into the bliss of ignorance and then other times I think, I will try to make sense of it or I will try to guess where they are going with it. I am definitely dealing with it on a regular basis on this show,’ she says empathising with the fans who are finding it hard to keep up with the subtle clues and coincidences littered throughout the series, without resorting to episode guides and online forums.
With 40 days of island life under the survivors’ increasingly tightening belts, some surprises unfold in the form of new characters – including the antagonistic Ana Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez) and towering Mr Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). Expect more cliffhangers than a mountaineering expedition to the Himalayas during season two and be patient until episode three when the curiosity will be, admittedly briefly, satisfied. Things will get wild, brutal and the body count will grow. Lilly also reveals that we will come to discover the making of feisty fugitive Kate, including why she originally ran from the law and why her dying mother is scared of her. ‘I was really looking forward to filming season two. It was so much fun to film and it was even better to see,’ she says hinting at the excitement in store. ‘It was so satisfying to get the answer and give people that key into Kate, it made it so that now I feel like instead of playing a veiled woman I get to play an open woman which is a completely new for me.’
While Lilly says her character undergoes somewhat of an onscreen transition in the latest season, don’t expect her to be doing the laundry or donning Marigolds anytime soon. The woman named second sexiest woman on the planet, by men’s magazine Maxim, also says: ‘I’m disappointed when it comes across that we’re perfectly manicured and coiffed, because my nails are always filthy, my hands are always scratched up, I’ve always got bruises all over my body from the role, and genuinely, if you were to walk on the set, I think I’m exactly as I would be were I genuinely stranded on a tropical island.’
Lost season two premieres on TV Land (Showtime) from November 3.