Evangeline Lilly's Hollywood Journey (& How Lost Changed Her Forever)

When Evangeline Lilly got cast as criminal castaway Kate Austen in the ABC series "Lost," she couldn't have predicted how much of a cultural phenomenon the show would become. Each episode kept viewers talking by delivering a weekly trove of puzzles to ponder — and a juicy love triangle to pick sides in.

The show launched Lilly's acting career, and it was inevitable that the public would want to learn more about the Hollywood newcomer. Much like the island that Kate got stranded on, Lilly is quite an enigma. Per Elle, her faith is so important to her that her that she's never without her Bible. However, "Lost" producer Bryan Burk told the mag, "She can swear like a sailor and dress provocatively, but that doesn't reflect her beliefs. She's a walking oxymoron." The "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" actor proved that she's a casual curser while trying to make herself seem relatable in a 2005 interview with Rolling Stone. "I'm an ordinary-Joe girl. I blow my nose after work, I drool in my sleep, and my s*** stinks," she said. Three out of four of these claims may be true, but transforming into a warrior elf and shrinking down to the size of a wasp via cinematic magic aren't everyday occurrences for most people.

Sure, she and her castmates left viewers with a lot of unsolved mysteries when they left the island, but we can chart the course of Evangeline Lilly's life from "Lost" to the MCU and beyond.

Nicole Evangeline Lilly spent her younger years in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, where her father worked as a produce manager at a supermarket. In addition to getting a job at a makeup counter, Lilly's mother ran an at-home daycare, per Elle, apparently without any screens serving as a second sitter. "We didn't watch TV," Lilly told Women's Health. "My family didn't have a lot of money, and I'm grateful for that. Money is the longest route to happiness."

Lilly managed to entertain herself without a costly cable subscription. "I've always written stories or poems. I can't not write," she told BuzzFeed. By age 8, she could boast having a piece published in her school's newsletter. "My passion — my truest passion — the thing that fulfills me and makes me feel whole as a human being is writing," she said in a 2019 Syfy Wire interview. But young Lilly's days soon became filled with other extracurricular activities; in addition to attending soccer practice and student council meetings, the straight-A student was a Sunday school teacher. "I was a bit of an overachiever," she confessed to BuzzFeed.

At age 18, she went on a mission trip to the Philippines. "It was one of the best experiences of my life," Lilly told Stuff. She thought she would continue doing humanitarian work and began studying international relations as a University of British Columbia student. However, a need for cash set her on a different path.

Evangeline Lilly had an eclectic pre-Hollywood résumé. While working as a flight attendant, she once found an innovative way to make one passenger's flight as unpleasant as he was making it for her. Per Lilly, she had a full tank of gas — and we're not talking about jet fuel. "I decided to save it all up, and when I was walking past him ... I let it rip, right in his face," she recalled during a 2011 appearance on "The Tonight Show" (via HuffPost).

Lilly told Metro that a pastor helped her get an even worse job when she was in need of tuition money. "Doing oil changes and grease jobs on big rig trucks in the winter in Canada was harder," she said. The future star went from changing oil to slathering oil on her body when she needed a new ride. In hopes of winning a year-long truck lease, Lilly told Shape that she competed in a bikini pageant. She took home the prize, which likely came in handy when she decided to get an agent so that she could audition for commercials.

In an ad for Live Links, Lilly tried to tempt viewers to call an 800 number, promising them that singles in their area were waiting to chat for free. One year after the commercial made her a common sight on late-night TV, she got her big break.

Evangeline Lilly's first foray into acting was just to help keep her in college, which is why she was only interested in accepting roles in locally filmed commercials. "My agent kept bugging me go out for proper auditions," she recalled to BuzzFeed. However, Lilly remained immune to stardom's siren song until a close friend suggested that fear of success was holding her back. She finally agreed to audition for some pilots in 2004 and was stunned when she was asked to jet off to Hollywood for a screen test. But upon learning that she would be joining the cast of "Lost," the idea of acting for a living became unattractive again. 

Because she'd only read bits of the script, she couldn't see the full picture of what the show was going to be and concluded that the concept was rather dull. "It was a plane crash on a desert island. I thought, 'Oh, give me a break. A dramatic 'Gilligan's Island,'" Lilly told Women's Health.

While she soon changed her mind about the show's writing, her time filming "Lost" in Hawaii wasn't always pleasant. "[I] had a bad experience on set with being basically cornered into doing a scene partially naked," Lilly claimed on "The Lost Boys" podcast. She was so traumatized that she started shaking and crying afterward. According to the actor, it allegedly wasn't the only time she was pressured into showing more of her body than she was comfortable with.

Before she embarked on her "Lost" journey, Evangeline Lilly got hitched in 2003. Her husband was a Canadian hockey player named Murray Hone, whom the Mirror describes as her college boyfriend. Sources claimed to the National Enquirer that it was Hone who convinced Lilly to pursue an acting career, even seeking out side gigs so that he could financially support her. But success purportedly spoiled their relationship. "She got to Hawaii and told him she was having second thoughts about their marriage," an insider alleged. "She didn't return his calls."

The couple divorced in 2004, and it wasn't long before rumors of a romance between Lilly and her "Lost" co-star, Dominic Monaghan, started circulating on the web. But unlike many of the show's mysteries, this one didn't go unsolved. Monaghan remained coy about their relationship status in a January 2006 interview with People, but did say, "We both have the ability to live in the moment, and we both are not that impressed by what is thrown at you by the industry." A few months later, the couple was photographed enjoying a steamy, rather cinematic make-out session on an Oahu beach, per PopSugar.

In October 2006, Hello! reported that Lilly and Monaghan were making wedding plans. With their relationship reaching such a serious stage, Lilly was finally ready to speak to the media about her beau. "[I] couldn't be happier," she gushed. "With him I feel at peace and fulfilled."

Evangeline Lilly and Dominic Monaghan called it quits in 2009, but Lilly quickly found a new love: Norman Kali, a member of the "Lost" production crew. Kali reportedly had previously dated "House" star Lisa Edelstein.

In 2013, Monaghan put his ex on blast. In response to a Twitter user who commented on how great Lilly looked in "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug," the actor wrote, "Nah. I don't date cheaters." Years later, Monaghan opened up about how Lilly broke his heart when they broke up. "It was probably the first time in my life that I was just kind of all in," he revealed in a 2022 appearance on Anna Faris' "Unqualified" podcast. He admitted that his drinking was getting out of hand at the time, and he'd had some maturing to do. Monaghan said of his ex and their public split, "I think she was looking around to see what else was an option, and unfortunately, there was a little bit of a crossover, which was upsetting to me."

The year their breakup reportedly took place, Lilly shared her views on love. Per Contact Music, she admitted that she became so fascinated with the idea of having romantic feelings for two people simultaneously that she quizzed her "Lost" castmates and crew members about their beliefs on the matter. "For me, I can imagine loving two different people," she said, "but I don't think I have the capacity for that because it would require so much of me."

As some point during her six seasons on "Lost," Evangeline Lilly became dissatisfied with the show's writing. She complained that her character's story became too focused on her love life and suggested that the strong-willed survivor was just being used as a plot device to further other characters' storylines. "I did throw scripts across rooms when I would read them, because I would get very frustrated by the diminishing amount of autonomy that she had," Lilly said on "The Lost Boys" podcast. But the scripts weren't her only issue. She told BuzzFeed she discovered that she really disliked acting, and she also found the fame side of her profession unpalatable. "I was instantly launched into international stardom, and that was really uncomfortable for me. I instantly balked, didn't know how to deal with it," she told The Hollywood Reporter.

Lilly resolved to retire after shooting the 2010 "Lost" finale, but she did appear in one movie, the 2011 sci-fi thriller "Real Steel," before attempting to close the door on that chapter of her life. She then found herself surrounded by reminders of it: Lilly and her partner, Norman Kali, made their home in Hawaii, where the show was filmed. "I had to find a place in which I could be happy," she said in a People interview. That happiness involved a lot of surfing and writing. "For me, writing is superior to acting," she told BuzzFeed. "Writers can live relatively normal lives."

In 2011, Evangeline Lilly and Norman Kali welcomed their first child. Lilly decided to give birth at home, later explaining to Women's Health, "We wanted it to be about the two of us bringing our son into the world, not a doctor and nurse." The birth became a rather harrowing ordeal, as Lilly labored for 30 hours. She also decided to give birth outdoors — despite the weather being less than ideal.

When she appeared on "Conan" in 2015, Lilly recalled how a thunderstorm raged around her as she pushed for an excruciating eight hours. The power was out, as well, so she had to labor in darkness. It took some immense mental toughness to endure everything going on, and Lilly was doing it without painkillers. Somehow, she was able to meditate amid the chaos. "Sometimes, I wonder if maybe I had come back to real life and participated, if it wouldn't have been a bit shorter," she said. When Conan O'Brien questioned her about what it was like being in that Zen-like state, Lilly explained, "It's sort of like a tornado. If you can get to the center of the pain — like the deepest, craziest, most intense part of the pain — it's like the eye of the storm."

Lilly and Kali hadn't yet picked out a name for their son but became inspired by the circumstances surrounding his arrival. They christened him Kahekili, which means "the thunder" in Hawaiian.

Evangeline Lilly told ComingSoon.net that she was such a huge J.R.R. Tolkien fan that she initially refused to watch Peter Jackson's movies based on the author's "Lord of the Rings" series. "I didn't think it was possible that a film could represent the books appropriately," she explained. She changed her mind after seeing them, and she told The Hollywood Reporter that she later met Jackson through her ex, "LOTR" star Dominic Monaghan. While speaking to Jackson at an awards show, she was enormously flattered when he told her that he would have cast her as an elf if they'd crossed paths before he started working on the films. However, she also told HuffPost, "It broke my heart! I was like, 'But they're over! That means I'll never be an elf!'"

Luckily, Jackson wasn't done exploring Middle-earth. He created a new character, a woodland elf warrior named Tauriel, with Lilly in mind while working on the 2013 film "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug." Jackson had a hard time reaching the actor, who was enjoying her retirement in her Hawaiian hobbit hole. When he finally did, Lilly couldn't say no to the dream role. "I thought I was done, but I really wanted to do the movie," she told The Hollywood Reporter. "The little 13-year-old girl in me was like, 'I get to be a woodland elf? What?'" The experience ended up being one of the most memorable of her life.

In addition to offering Evangeline Lilly a role that made her realize that acting can be a joyful experience, Peter Jackson helped her make one of her biggest dreams come true. 

It all started when Lilly was 14 years old and discovered Dr. Seuss. She told Syfy Wire that she fell in love with the way the author invented his own words when he couldn't find a pleasing rhyme. "I started making a list of silly, irreverent, wonderful words, and one of the words on that list just stuck in my head and on my tongue," she recalled. "That word was 'squickerwonker.'" The word became the inspiration for a poem, per BuzzFeed, which later evolved into a children's book titled "The Squickerwonkers."

The book is about a spoiled little girl who meets a group of creepy marionettes that represent various vices, per Publisher's Weekly. Through Jackson's Weta Workshop — a company that crafts props, prosthetics, and more — Lilly met an artist named Johnny Fraser-Allen who was interested in illustrating her book. Upon seeing how he envisioned her macabre characters, Lilly knew that she'd found the right illustrator for the job. "I was like, 'Holy s*** — he completed my world,'" she told BuzzFeed. "It was what you hope and imagine will happen when you find your spouse." The first book of "The Squickerwonkers" series was published in 2014 and was followed by two sequels.

After appearing in "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug," Evangeline Lilly had to decide whether to resume her retirement or take advantage of casting directors' renewed interest in her. Many actors would jump at the opportunity to join the MCU, but when Lilly's manager told her that Marvel was interested in potentially casting her in the 2015 movie "Ant-Man," she laughed. "I said, 'Have they run out of superheroes, and they're now making them up?'" she recalled in an interview with BBC Radio 1. "... I'd never heard of Ant-Man, and it sounded ridiculous." She was ready to turn down the offer but decided to reconsider for a totally relatable reason: She was told that Paul Rudd would be playing the lead role. "I was like, 'Oh s***. I love Paul Rudd. I really want to work with him!'" she recounted in an interview with BuzzFeed.

Almost a decade earlier, Lilly had harbored hope that she would someday play the DC superhero Wonder Woman, per Elle. However, she was no superhero fangirl; she'd never even watched a Marvel movie. Before she accepted the role of Hope Van Dyne in "Ant-Man," she decided to do her homework by checking out some of the MCU's offerings. "I thought, these are actually incredible — they're making fantastic films," she told BuzzFeed.

In addition to Rudd, Lilly told BBC Radio 1 that a major selling point then became the possibility of getting to work with "The Avengers" cast someday.

Evangeline Lilly was visibly pregnant with her second child when it came time for her to promote "Ant-Man" in June 2015. While fielding questions from the media at the movie's Hollywood premiere, she showed off her baby bump in a black-and-white color-block dress with an asymmetrical neckline. "I went and got an ultrasound recently and it looked like a photograph, like, I could see my child's face!" she told ET. However, Lilly revealed that she and her partner, Norman Kali, didn't want to find out the baby's sex until the little one decided to make their grand entrance.

She compared her second pregnancy to her first in an interview with People, saying, "I'm much more tired this time. The last time I was off work, I had no children, I had a partner who was busy working 18 hours a day, so I had all day to meditate and love on my baby and just be pregnant." While speaking to Ocean Drive about her disinterest in getting married, Lilly revealed that Kali later decided to become a stay-at-home dad.

The couple didn't make a big announcement when baby no. 2 was born, but in October 2015, E! News published photos of Lilly rocking a bikini with no bump in sight. Us Weekly later reported that the couple had welcomed a daughter. "What I wanted originally was six kids," Lilly told Ocean Drive in 2015, revealing that she and Kali had also looked into adoption.

When Evangeline Lilly reprised her role as Hope Van Dyne in the 2018 movie "Ant-Man and the Wasp," she made history: The Wasp was the MCU's first female title character. Lilly wanted to ensure that she gave her performance her all, telling CBR that she worked hard on mastering a fighting style that would be distinguishable from other Marvel characters. "I love the idea that you'd be able to say, "Oh, that's Wasp. I can tell. I can tell by the way she fights,'" she said. One way she did this is by pushing back when she was told to mimic the movements of male fighters. "What's the point of having a woman superhero if we're just going to make her a man?" she told The Sun. "Like, no. She can be feminine, she can be elegant and graceful, it doesn't make her weak."

Lilly also got to wear a super-suit, and she also had some say in its design. She revealed that she did rock a corset to give her a bit of a wasp waist, but she told BBC Radio 1 that there was another area of her body that she didn't want squeezed in. "My biggest complaint was that it flattened my butt, and I will not be having any of that," she said of her first costume fitting. However, she also didn't want the suit to give her any extra junk in the trunk or make her bust look bigger.

In 2019, Evangeline Lilly decided to cut her hair herself and film her transformation. She shared a carousel on Instagram that began with a sped-up video of the actor hacking off a handful of hair at ear level. "Stop or keep going??" she wrote. Some of her followers begged her to stop, with one commenter writing, "Aww why your long hair was beautiful!" But Lilly kept on going until she was rocking a buzzcut.

She later told 9Honey Celebrity that her decision to shave her head wasn't just about desiring an edgy new look, although she did say that she'd always admired singer Sinéad O'Connor's shorn scalp. "I was going through a really transformative time myself where I was shedding some old pain and trauma, and trying to step into a new life and light and freedom," Lilly explained. "[It was] just like a release and it felt so freeing."

A year after she made the dramatic change, she got cast in the movie "South of Heaven." Lilly played a character with cancer, and the role required her to keep her hair short. Her prescient home haircut meant that she didn't have to lose much length, but the director also decided that she should be blond to reflect her character's sunny disposition. Lilly began regularly bleaching her hair to ensure that her dark roots never showed on film. "By the end of the shoot, it was falling out," she told People.

Evangeline Lilly caused controversy in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when she revealed that she was not self-isolating with her family. "Just dropped my kids off at gymnastics camp," she wrote on Instagram, adding the hashtag "#businessasusual." At the time, there were no mask mandates or available vaccines, and many critics expressed disappointment over Lilly's refusal to do her part to help stop the spread. "That's selfish. If you value your freedom over people's lives, you're a part of the problem," one Twitter user wrote.

Lilly responded to some of her Instagram followers' comments, per Yahoo! Entertainment, and explained her stance. According to the actor, she was more concerned about government overreach than preventing lives from being lost. She also downplayed the severity of the virus, writing, "Where we are right now feels a lot too close to Marshall Law [sic] for my comfort already, all in the name of a respiratory flu." 

Lilly revealed that her father had leukemia and was living with her, but she wrote, "Some people value freedom over their lives. We all make our choices." She would later regret her choice to post what she did; she issued an apology and revealed that she had decided to quarantine with her family after all. However, when vaccines became available, Lilly joined anti-vaxxers at the 2022 Defeat the Mandates rally in D.C. "I was pro choice before COVID and I am still pro choice today," she wrote on Instagram.

Years after she tried to leave Hollywood for good, Evangeline Lilly finally got bitten by the acting bug — or stung, rather. Playing the Wasp is what made her so passionate about her craft that she started lobbying for more acting opportunities. Early in her film career, this didn't happen. "I've just been fortunate and lucky enough to have some pretty great filmmakers come to me and say, 'We'd like you to play this role or that role,'" she told HuffPost.

But who needs other roles when you're the Wasp? While promoting "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" in February 2023, Lilly told Variety that she wanted her character to get a stand-alone film. A year earlier, she'd lobbied for the Wasp and her fellow female Avengers to team up for their own A-Force film. "To see women work together, and in that way as a team, is not something we've seen enough of," she told CBR.

One reason Lilly might want to keep reprising her role? Her son thinks it's pretty awesome. "Maybe Lil Nas X might be cooler. Or Lazarbeam. But I'm up there with all those guys," she told People of just how much she rose in her son's esteem upon joining the MCU. He even pretended like he was the Wasp once. "It chokes me up, because that's a cultural shift," Lilly told Mama's Geeky. "For a little boy to pretend to be a female superhero, this is no small thing."