Evangeline Lilly, who plays the beauteous Kate on “Lost,†confesses she’s part gypsy. It was that restless spirit that almost made her turn down the chance to costar in the ABC hit television series. It was the same wanderlust that has kept her on the move.
“As soon as I left high school I cut my ties with everyone I knew and took off to a new city and I started again,†says Lilly, seated at a small, round table in the corner of a dark bar in a hotel here.
“I moved (between) towns in British Columbia. I remember saying to myself when I got to this new town, `You can be anyone you want to be now. Nobody knows you. Nobody has an expectation of you. So you CHOOSE who you want to be.’ And choosing who you want to be is a very different thing than feeling like you just are who you are.â€
For the next three years Lilly moved to six different places, each time assuming a new persona. “I tried out six different personalities and characters. It was really an amazing time, very lonely but very formative – Kelowna and White Rock and Vancouver – it was usually a five-hour driving radius, but still people didn’t know me. And what came out of that was I got a piece of this person and a piece of that person and a piece of that person and formulated the person I wanted to be from all those different characters I tried on.â€
Those experiences taught her not to care what other people think. “That was very empowering,†says Lilly, who’s dressed in a multi-colored sweater cut to the naval, blue denim pants and black patent pumps.
“Of course, as an adolescent you care very much what people think of you. I always felt like not only did I care what people thought of me, I was a very faithful Christian as a teenager. I cared very much what the church thought of me and what God thought of me, what my parents and my peers thought of me and what the entire world thought of me. Because I felt that was my spiritual responsibility and that was something I had to let go of when I realized I’m responsible to myself and to God and that whatever any one else in the world thinks – even if they’re the church – does not matter.â€
Lilly, who longs to be a writer, wasn’t sure she wanted to act. She had no designs on becoming a model, either. But she found herself doing commercials to pay her way through college. “It was the most degrading work I’ve ever done,†she shakes her head.
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