Evangeline Lilly

Nicole Evangeline Lilly, born August 3, 1979, is a Canadian actress and author. She achieved international recognition for her first leading role as Kate Austen in the ABC television drama series Lost (2004–2010). Her performance earned her six Saturn Award nominations for Best Actress on Television and a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama Series.

Lilly was born in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, and raised in British Columbia in a Baptist and Mennonite household. Her mother was a daycare centre owner, and her father was a home economics teacher. She graduated from W. J. Mouat Secondary School in Abbotsford, where she served as vice president of the student council and captain of the soccer team. To pay for her undergraduate tuition, she worked as a waitress, a flight attendant for Royal Airlines, and performed grease jobs and oil changes on big rig trucks. Driven by an interest in world development and humanitarian causes, she majored in international relations at the University of British Columbia.

Her acting career began after she was discovered by a Ford Modelling Agency agent in Kelowna, British Columbia. She initially took on commercial roles and non-speaking television appearances in Smallville and Kingdom Hospital, alongside work on a gaming television channel, G4TV. In late 2003, she auditioned for Lost and was selected for the female lead role of Kate Austen. Appearing in 108 episodes across six seasons, Lilly's performance brought her widespread media coverage and established her acting career.

Following her television breakthrough, Lilly expanded into feature films. She appeared in the Academy Award-winning war film The Hurt Locker (2008), sharing the Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Ensemble Cast with her co-stars, and starred in the psychological thriller Afterwards (2008). In 2011, she played boxing gym owner Bailey Tallet in the sports drama Real Steel. She was subsequently cast as the Elven guard head Tauriel in Peter Jackson's film adaptations The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), undergoing training in archery, swordplay, and the Elvish language for the role.

In 2015, Lilly joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Hope van Dyne in Ant-Man. She reprised the character in Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)—becoming the first superheroine to be a titular character in an MCU film—and returned for Avengers: Endgame (2019), the animated series What If...? (2021), and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023). Her other screen credits include the horror film Little Evil (2017) and the dramas Crisis (2021) and South of Heaven (2021), winning Best Actress at the AFIN International Film Festival for the latter. Lilly is also the author of the children's book series The Squickerwonkers, which debuted in 2013.

Alongside her career in entertainment, Lilly has maintained long-standing involvement in humanitarian work, including running an NGO in Rwanda. In June 2024, she announced an indefinite hiatus from acting to focus on her family. She subsequently appeared in the independent documentary Getting Lost in September 2024, and in June 2026, she narrated and executive produced an updated version of the documentary Farmacy of Light. Following an accidental fall into a boulder in May 2025, Lilly revealed in January 2026 that she had sustained a traumatic brain injury and was focusing on her recovery.