Jemimah Wright explores Evangeline Lilly’s Christian upbringing, her years of questioning and searching, and what she says about following Christ today.
I remember Evangeline Lilly from her character Kate Austen in the 2004 to 2010 series Lost. She was beautiful despite the unglamourous the plane-crash conditions on the ‘remote pacific island’ they were filming on.
For more than two decades, she has inhabited some of Hollywood’s biggest fictional worlds – from Tauriel in The Hobbit to Hope van Dyne in Marvel’s Ant-Man films. But recently, the Canadian actress says her priorities lie elsewhere.
“I retired from acting about five years ago,” Lilly told The Christian Post in August. “At my core, the thing that’s most important to me is my faith.”
Lilly has since described her departure from Hollywood as an indefinite decision, leaving open the possibility that she could return to acting. For now, however, she says she wants to devote her time to things that matter more deeply to her.
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One of those things is Legend of Destruction, a historical animated epic about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in AD 70. Lilly voices Queen Berenice, a Jewish ruler caught up in the political and religious turmoil surrounding Jerusalem, and is as an executive producer on the project.
For Lilly, the film offered an opportunity to engage with questions of faith, morality, biblical history and human nature in a way that she says her blockbuster career did not.
For Lilly, the film offered an opportunity to engage with questions of faith, morality, biblical history and human nature in a way that she says her blockbuster career did not. “I’m so proud to have been a part of these huge, incredible franchises,” she said. “I think in so many ways they were important to a lot of people, and also they don’t really satisfy my passions.”
Lilly was raised Christian and has spoken openly about how her faith has changed over the years.
When she joined Lost, she says she was “very devout and evangelical”. But the experience of becoming famous, together with significant changes in her life, prompted her to ask difficult questions.
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“As I went through some different questioning and struggle, as my life completely changed and got turned upside down, I started to ask really big questions,”
“As I went through some different questioning and struggle, as my life completely changed and got turned upside down, I started to ask really big questions,” she told Esquire in 2023.
Her search took her beyond the Christian books she had grown up with. She explored texts including the Tao Te Ching and Bhagavad Gita, while continuing to describe herself as a Christian. In a later interview with InHabit Magazine, Lilly explained: “I would still call myself a Christian; the word literally translates to Christ follower and I am 100% a Christ follower.” She described her faith as having moved from being “extremely definitive and exclusive” to something “very explorative and inclusive”.
She has also described having “long, meandering philosophical conversations with God”, saying that questioning no longer frightens her.
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Lilly was born in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, in 1979 and grew up in British Columbia with two sisters. Biographical sources describe her upbringing as Baptist and Mennonite. She has also spoken about being raised Christian herself. Her early faith was active rather than merely cultural. She taught Sunday school for eight years and became involved in humanitarian work through her church. As a teenager, she travelled to the Philippines on a church humanitarian trip, an experience that contributed to her long-standing interest in international development and humanitarian causes.
Her Christian background also influenced her decision to pursue humanitarian work alongside her university studies. At the University of British Columbia, she studied international relations and became involved in world development and human rights.That combination of faith, questioning and concern for people on the margins has remained a thread through Lilly’s life. Now, reflecting on her name – Nicole Evangeline Lilly – she told The Christian Post that it was only after becoming deeply serious about her faith that she investigated its meaning. She said she discovered it meant “victorious Evangelical bride of Christ”.
“That’s a big responsibility,” she reflected.
Speaking about Legend of Destruction, she said humanity is flawed and that “it is only by grace that the world has kept turning and humanity has survived”. She believes that grace should then shape how we treat other people – including those we disagree with. “That grace that is given to us should be passed on to our neighbour and our enemy,” she said. For an actress who spent years portraying fictional heroes, Lilly now seems increasingly interested in a different kind of story: the big questions of life, faith, humanity and what it means to follow Christ.
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