Evangeline Lilly Was Pressured to Get Naked in Uncomfortable ‘Lost’ Scenes

In this summer’s super fun superhero movie Ant-Man and the Wasp, Evangeline Lilly stepped up and became a badass size-changing crimefighter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But, as she revealed in an interview on the LOST Boys podcast, her current stint in the spotlight playing a strong and capable female hero went way differently than her time on Lost.

Lilly made her big debut on the ABC mystery/sci-fi series/phenomenon, landing the major role after just a few uncredited bit parts. But being new to Hollywood meant that Lilly wasn’t yet comfortable enough to speak up when she felt pressured, and that led to some very upsetting shooting conditions.

“In Season 3, I’d had a bad experience on set with being basically cornered into doing a scene partially naked, and I felt had no choice in the matter,” Lilly said on the podcast. “I was mortified and I was trembling, and when it finished, I was crying my eyes out and I had to go on and do a very formidable, very strong scene thereafter.”

That wasn’t the last time Lilly was forced to undress on camera against her wishes. “In Season 4, another scene came up where Kate was undressing and I fought very hard to have that scene be under my control and I failed to control it again. So I then said, ‘That’s it, no more. You can write whatever you want — I won’t do it. I will never take my clothes off on this show again.’ And I didn’t.”

Losing control of her bodily autonomy wasn’t the only thing she didn’t like about Lost as the show progressed and started to focus more on a love triangle between her character Kate and the male leads Jack (Matthew Fox) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway).

“I felt like my character went from… having her own story and her own journey and her own agendas to chasing men around the island and that irritated the shit out of me,” said Lilly. She added that she “did throw scripts across rooms when I’d read them because I would get very frustrated by the diminishing amount of autonomy she had and the diminishing amount of her own story there was to play.”

Lilly’s advocacy for nuanced and rewarding female roles has at least partially culminated this year in Ant-Man and the Wasp, the first Marvel film to give co-lead billing to a female superhero (played by Lilly). The move is a major step forward not only for Marvel but for the mini Ant-Man franchise as well. The first film, 2015’s Ant-Man, saw the infinitely capable Hope Van Dyne (Lilly) repeatedly sidelined because the affable Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) was the film’s lead star. That film ended with a mid-credits scene wherein Hope was presented with the high-tech Wasp suit, to which she responded, “It’s about damn time.”

(via Yahoo!)

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