EVANGELINE LILLY//CINEMA CONFIDENTIAL
I’m Kate. You show me the other bunch. Show me. That’s how you gone. I am so happy to be sitting down with you. This has been an amazing week and so much fun. Thank you for being here. Thank you for coming. It’s so cool that you’re here. I love it. How How did you decide to take part of this? Oh man, if I could list all of the synchronicities and like minor miracles that were involved in me deciding to be here. When um Franchesco and Franchesca invited me, initially, I was just so incredibly joyful that this merging of my two worlds was happening where I have been an actress for 20 years and then I retired and I retired to pursue things in the space of like healing and more spiritual work and giving back and doing things to help other people with their creativity and exploring more of my creativity. I mean, it was like every part of that was involved in this. The quiet collective is like, let’s all be more conscious and more present. And then the script to pitch element was like, let’s all express ourselves and tell our stories. And and then coming as the keynote speaker, I got to pull on my 20 years of experience in Hollywood and bring that to the table. So, it just felt like really really perfect for this transition point in my life. Definitely. and and some of the stories that I’ve already heard. I’m going to hear your keynote speech tomorrow, but it’s it’s really inspiring to hear from somebody with years of experience. And I want to take you back to the beginning. May I? Yes. Why Why did you decide to jump in this crazy industry? Oh my god. I didn’t I didn’t. This crazy industry decided to jump on me. I was a victim the whole time. I was actually um an extra on film sets and I was paying my way through university by doing extra work. Not with aspirations to become a famous actress but just with aspirations to actually pay my tuition and my rent and my insurance and everything else. And um and then in an exercise of self-realization, like a psychological exercise of like I’m going to stop playing small and I’m going to let my light shine. I decided to let my agent who had been pestering me to send me out on real auditions for years. Send me. I was like, “Okay, fine. You can send me out on these auditions.” And my fourth or fifth real audition, not for commercials, but for like a role in a film or TV show, was my audition for Lost. Okay. And the whole world. Yes. Yes. It just went from, you know, one day being a university student and the next day being an international TV star. How did that feel? Terrible. I hated it. I hated it so much. And you’d think there might have been some sense of sort of fantasy realization except that as an extra whenever I would watch the actors on set and the way the whole room would change when they would walk in and everyone would suddenly go from like relaxed and having a great time to be like tense and on edge and like okay the actors are here. Oh my god. I would think these poor people what a terrible job. Like that might be the worst job in the world. That’s what I used to think. And then all of a sudden I’m now doing this job and not just on set, but like everywhere I go, restaurants, cafes, walking down the street, it’s like the the molecules change around you and suddenly you’re no longer in reality with everyone else, but you’re in this other dimension and that’s a lonely place to be. Yeah. Do people still call you Kate when they see you sometimes? Um, so when I was on Lost, nobody knew my name. I was Kate to the entire world. So if I was in a train station or an airport or wherever I was the gas station, it was Kate, you know, and I would be like, you know, because I was like, I do have a name. I am a person outside of that character. And thank God because I’ve actually had a career beyond her. And now I’ve played some of these other characters that are well known to people. People finally know my name now. So I get a lot more of Angeline than I used to. And the Marvel set. Yes. How was that experience? Yeah. Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Mar Marvel is this strange hybrid of an indie art house like the Marvel Studios executives the people who run that branch are really passionate comic book geeks who just want to tell great comic stories you know just great superhero stories and so they’re it’s so great there’s this like collaborative element and they’re really excited about everything they’re doing still and they really want you to be a part of that and and so that has this indie world feel that’s really beautiful and then of Of course, there’s the Disney machine, like the monster that is Disney that is like, we need content, you need to produce, and you get kind of cranked through that machine. And I would say that like even the higherups in Marvel, there’s a certain element of being cranked through the machine and and having to to put out a certain quantity of material every year. And that can be really detrimental to the creative process and it can get in the way of projects being truly unique and truly special and inspired but instead just being you know the result of like um demand and supply and demand. Do you have a character from the ones that you have played that really sort of speaks to you I guess in a different way that was really special? Yes. She’s probably my least known character. Also, um there’s a character named Annie in a film called um South of Heaven and it’s a film I played opposite Jason Sedakus and it was directed by Aaron Cashellis who is an um Israeli director and he was somebody who had done a film called Big Bad Wolves which if you’ve never seen it is amazing. Yeah. And um so I took the job one because of Aaron, two because of Jason, and even more so because of Annie, the character. She’s a woman who’s dying of terminal cancer, and yet is probably the most present and alive character in the film, and has this incredible ability to be in grace all the time with herself and with Jason’s character, who is her the love of her life. Um, and I felt like for the first time ever, I got to play somebody who felt a little more like me. Um, so many of my characters have been so formidable. You know, they’re just these like stoic, strong, capable, kick-ass women. And when I started in the business at 24, that felt like a good place for me. I was a tomboy. I was tough. I was fit and like ready to go. And I would compete with the boys. And I was like, “Yeah, like I can do anything a guy can do.” And that was a great place for me to occupy. But as I went through my adult life and I started healing some of my core wounds and really like rediscovering the little girl that lives inside of me who always liked pixies and unicorns and fluff and pink and like, you know, was just soft and gentle. this reality of who I am was surfacing and I really wanted to express that more and more and more and started to get more frustrated with not finding roles that I could express that in. And with Annie, I got to express the softer side of Evangelene and and the more feminine um more vulnerable side of me. Very very lucky man. We both are. Is that what that’s another side of you that you’re doing with your writing as well? Expressing another evangelene. Yes. Yes. Um it is such an incredible honor to I’ve I’ve recently um started a Substack page. And for those of you who don’t know what a Substack page is, it’s a social media platform essentially for writers and readers, like people who actually really want to read what you have to say. And it has been one of the best things that I have done since retirement. I have always wanted to write and express my feelings and express some of my beliefs and express some of the ways that I see the world and wrestle with ideas in a public way so that other people can come in and wrestle with me. And the responses and the comments from my my followers or my my readers have been so intelligent and sensitive and challenging and evocative. And I’ve just felt so rewarded by knowing that people really want to have these media conversations and they want to see deeper into me and not just have it be this sort of tough kick-ass chick facade. Yeah.
Talking to the beautiful and talented Evangeline Lilly on being part of a screenwriting retreat, her Hollywood career and retiring from it as well as life and writing. She is absolutely amazing, thank you, Evangeline!
Camera: Mitko Angelov
Videos used from the following films:
Lost (2004)
The Hobbit (2013)
Ant-Man and The Wasp (2018)
South of Heaven (2021)
Location: The Quiet Collective – https://thequietcollectivehub.com/