![]() ![]() ![]() “But I suddenly realized I was legitimately afraid of fame.” It wasn’t just the amount of coverage but also how she was covered that left her feeling particularly exposed. “All my life, I’d been like, No way, nothing scares me,” she says. That spread, in which this magazine described her as “the sexiest inhabitant of the freakiest island of all time,” was indicative of the way in which Lilly crash-landed into our cultural consciousness. Immediately, they put me straight into Esquire, half undressed.” “When I hired my first publicist, the one thing I told them was ‘I do not want to be the new, young, hot piece of ass,’” she remembers. It made Lilly one of television’s biggest breakout stars-but not entirely for the reasons she might’ve wanted. Her reluctance stemmed from a 2006 piece during the second season of Lost, an ABC series about a group of plane-crash survivors that became a mega hit as soon as it entered the airspace in 2004. “When I got asked to do this article, my answer was ‘Fuck no, I will not do Esquire,’” Lilly admits toward the end of our conversation. “That's a very dangerous game to play in Hollywood, because there are a lot of agendas.” ![]() “I've spent most of my life trying to be a good girl,” she says. ![]() She’s found her voice but also learned the cost of using it. She’s now in the most Hollywood of franchises while trying to live that normal life outside Hollywood, caught between what the job demands of her and what she wants for herself. She’s reckoning with the occupational hazards of acting, particularly as experienced by a woman who catapulted to fame when the industry was still a boys’ club, being sexualized and, at the same time, dampening certain qualities to present as the woman those boys wanted to see. “I have not been reading scripts or taking meetings,” she says. She says she’s tried to retire three times since-all unsuccessful, because an intriguing project has always come along-and has had her agents “on stand-down” for the past two years. That experience deepened questions she has constantly asked herself about a career that more or less took her by surprise: She was a twenty-four-year-old international-relations student with virtually no acting experience when she booked Lost. Lilly briefly became the subject of some Internet wrath. You don’t have to read too far between the lines to sense some lingering discomfort about the fallout last year after she shared a post on Instagram from a Washington, D.C., rally against vaccine mandates. “It was a bit of a personal choice not to go,” she says. She’d just made the decision not to appear at a press event in Australia that she'd been expected to attend with Rudd, Majors, and other costars. The Quantumania tour was supposed to be three weeks-mercifully shorter than the two months Lilly spent on the road for 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp-but now she expects it to be closer to two weeks, which is why I’ve found her at home in Hawaii. “Recently, I just felt this prompting to be gentler and work out less and not push my body so hard,” she says, wearing overalls over a white tank. It has been two decades since she started her acting career, and those twenty years have taught her, among other things, about her limits, what she can and can’t give of herself physically. When we talk, Lilly is a couple weeks away from the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (out now), the third entry in the franchise, in which she and Ant-Man, played by Paul Rudd, head into the infinitesimally small (even for insects) quantum realm to face off against Kang the Conqueror, played by Jonathan Majors, and kick off the next phase of Marvel movies. She has a friendly, disarming warmth, one that pairs deftly with the strong, often well-armed characters she has played: first in her breakout role as Kate Austen on Lost, then as the bow-and-dagger-wielding woodland elf Tauriel in The Hobbit, and, for almost a decade now, as Marvel’s the Wasp (government name: Hope Van Dyne). Her face is the same face that many a Lost fan will remember: high cheekbones, arrestingly bright eyes, a smile like a canyon. Her dyed-blonde hair is cut short, with brown roots showing beneath. She moved there to film the TV show Lost around 2004, and when it wrapped six years later, she stayed. I've always worked very little on purpose to sort of have a normal life outside of Hollywood.” The actress, forty-three, says this from her bedroom inside her home in Hawaii, on a recent January day that, at least via Zoom, appears to be as covetously bright and sunny as you’d expect a midwinter day in Hawaii to be. “I’ve always kept myself on the outside,” Evangeline Lilly says. ![]()
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