A Lost Star Hated The Best Seasons Of The Hit Series
Lost star Evangeline Lilly admits she can't watch the first two seasons because her work as Kate is, to her, "not very good."
Many stars cringe at watching themselves on screen and can be notoriously self-conscious for people whose jobs it is to be seen. When Lost star Evangeline Lilly recently appeared on the podcast series Happy Sad Confused with Josh Horowitz, she admitted that she too didn’t enjoy watching herself in the earliest season of the hit sci-fi drama.
Speaking about watching herself in the first couple of seasons of the show, Lilly had this to say: “We would have Lost parties where the cast would get together to watch the show, and when it would be a Kate-centric episode, I would wanna curl in a hole and die, ’cause I knew I was bad.”
Although the actress had been working a number of years before landing her role, it was still her first major role and her first as a series regular at that. In a number of ways, she was still learning her craft.
Lost was a career-defining moment for Evangeline Lilly, one which also served as a growth opportunity. She noted that as the seasons went on and she realized that both she and the show would be around for a while, she began to feel the need to improve.
And I do feel like season three was a turning point, where I went from ‘panicked, figure it out, just shoot from the hip, feel it, go with my gut,’ to ‘I hate this, I don’t wanna do this, get me out of here,’ to ‘oh, I guess if I’m here, I’m stuck, and I’m gonna stay, I should figure it out.’
Evangeline Lilly on when she embraced her role on Lost
Still, Evangeline Lilly asserts that her acting in the first seasons was not up to par. ”And I still to this day will stand by the fact that I can watch the first couple seasons and I cringe, because I’m not very good.” This is a surprising admission, given the general consensus about the first seasons of the show.
Lost will go down in history as one of the more polarizing television series of the 2010s. The premise is initially fairly straightforward: the show follows a group of survivors whose plane crashes on a mysterious island who band together and fight for survival. The sci-fi survivor drama procured a cult following of devoted fans as the increasingly twisting plot, use of flashback and flashforward, and dramatic intrigue of the first two seasons garnered it critical acclaim.
Some fans however felt that as the series’ plot became increasingly more complex, the quality began to dip. The final season and specifically the final episode became one of the more polarizing events of the decade in television drama.
Since they are regarded as the best seasons of Lost, Evangeline Lilly’s disdain for her acting in the first two seasons of the series is curious. Although some viewers criticized the way her character was written, most heaped Lilly with critical praise. For her role as Kate Austen, she was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama Series and won a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Lost’s Evangeline Lilly may be familiar to those who haven’t seen the series as well. She’s made a number of appearances in both film and television. Recently, she’s taken on a number of major roles that have seen her return to her science fiction roots.
In 2008 while still filming Lost, Evangeline Lilly starred in the Academy Award-winning war drama The Hurt Locker as Connie James. Later in 2013, she joined the iconic fantasy franchise inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels and starred in The Hobbit trilogy of films as Tauriel. More recently, she began portraying The Wasp in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, appearing in Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantamania, released earlier this week.
In hindsight, although Lost’s Evangeline Lilly may not have loved her own acting, the first seasons and her portrayal of Kate Austen were pretty widely beloved by fans of the series. It goes to show that even the most talented performers experience the same sometimes self-deprecating tendencies as the rest of us.
