Evangeline Lilly

Evangeline Lilly was born in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta in 1979, and her first significant job was the one most actors never get: Kate Austen, one of the leads of Lost, for six seasons from 2004 to 2010, on the biggest show on American network television for most of that run. It brought six Saturn Award nominations and a Golden Globe nomination, and it is still the work she is measured against.

Kate was a difficult part to play well. The writing spends years asking her to be fought over by two men and to look conflicted about it, and Lilly's response was to make the character's stubbornness the point instead of her availability. She is best in the show's angry stretches, worst when it asks her to be wistful, and she never once plays the character as a prize.

Film has mostly used her as franchise support. Peter Jackson's Hobbit films gave her Tauriel, a character written for the screen with no source in Tolkien, and she commits to her far past what the material returns. Marvel cast her as Hope van Dyne across the Ant-Man films and Avengers: Endgame, where she is plainly the more competent half of the partnership and gets a fraction of the jokes. Around those there are smaller things worth finding: a scene opposite the bomb squad in The Hurt Locker, a robot-boxing romance in Real Steel. She is also a published author, which a screen credit list does not show.