Evangeline Lilly interview: ‘Being surrounded by female Avengers was the most comfortable I’ve felt on set’
On her 42nd birthday, Evangeline Lilly was seated at a table with Michelle Pfeiffer, Michael Douglas and Bill Murray looking out at the vast vistas of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Quantum Realm. “I kept thinking, ‘I can’t believe this is my real life’,” she says when we meet in a central London hotel.
She was filming a scene for the latest superhero blockbuster Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania – she plays the Wasp – in a studio stage made up of thousands of LED screens that projected the CGI alternate dimension in which the film is mostly set.
Suddenly the images all changed; gone was the Quantum landscape and in its place a ‘happy birthday Evangeline’ cartoon. “They sang happy birthday and brought out a cake, it was very cool.” It seems even Hollywood stars get cake from their co-workers.
Quantumania is the third instalment of the Ant-Man and the Wasp series – the titular heroes can shrink and grow at will– and at the start, Lilly’s character Hope van Dyne is in a good place. She’s in love with Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man, on good terms with her science genius folks – played by Pfeiffer and Douglas – as well as her step-daughter, Cassie, and is running her own company that’s helping save the world. What can go wrong?
It turns out, a lot, when they’re all accidentally sucked into a sub-atomic dimension where multiple civilisations, and quite a few baddies, have made their home, and they have to work out how to get back – saving that microscopic yet vast world and ours at the same time.
Lilly was excited that this film offered more dramatic material, “that’s my wheelhouse,” she says. “Paul’s the comedian and I’m his straight man.” She had struggled to get a grip on the character in previous films but in a scene that didn’t make it to the movie, where the Wasp flies straight through an enemy plane, she had a eureka moment. “Something in my brain went, ‘She’s a bullet’… she’s sharp, she’s lethal and,” she laughs “she’s a little bit shiny.”
What she particularly likes about the Wasp is that she’s a world away from the highly objectified women superheroes of the past. “I’m allowed to be a character when I’m not sexual or sexy, it’s about if I’m capable and confident and able to do the job that needs to get done. That was a gift Marvel gave me and continues to give to me. They make all the men take their shirts off,” she says smiling, “but they don’t make us take our shirts off.”
She could discuss the change in comic book films’ portrayal of women with Pfeiffer, whose Catwoman, in Batman Returns three decades ago, was dressed in what you might now describe as a gimp suit. She learnt that as well as the overtly sexualised look, when the latex of the feline villain’s costume heated up it would shrink “until it was oppressively squeezing in on her and they had to get it off. The craziness that this was okay and acceptable for her to go through…”
Lilly’s suit for the Wasp, made of leather, is very comfortable, and in no way revealing. “When I first saw the images, I was astounded. At that point we’d had Black Widow [Scarlett Johansson] who had been sexualised in the earlier films. I suddenly realised I was living in a different time and space, and I could be freed from that.”
A highlight was when Lilly, who also starred in the TV show Lost and two of The Hobbit films, appeared with a number of the other female superheroes in a battle scene in Avengers: Endgame. “It was a great day, being surrounded by women. It’s the most comfortable I’ve ever felt on a film set. There was none of the stuff that goes along with being around a bunch of dudes. It was just me and the ladies.”
It wasn’t always like that though. She has spoken of how, when she first joined the MCU, it was a boys’ club – a “the sausage party” in her words. She laughs when I bring up the quote, and says, “That was the story of my career up until then, I was always surrounded by men.”
Informed by her own experience as a young actor, she reached out to her young co-star Kathryn Newton, who plays Cassie in the film, to offer support and any help she needed. “That was something I wished I could have had at her age. I wish there had been more older women around to mentor me and take me under their wing and take care of me.”
She has talked in the past about difficult experiences on set, including two scenes involving partial nudity for Lost, after which she never did a nude scene again. Lost’s co-creators have since apologised. Recently in the UK, the rise of intimacy coordinators on set have become a discussion with Sir Ian McKellen questioning the need, but Dame Emma Thompson hailing the work they do, especially in helping young women feel safe.
Lilly was initially unsure but is fully on board now. “In my experience, the pressures I’ve always had and the discomforts have always come from above, it’s never my co-stars. In fact, my co-stars suffer from the opposite problem, where they’re terrified to touch you or look at you in a salacious way, even if it calls for it in the script.
“Most male actors aren’t pigs, so they don’t know what to do with themselves... They’re afraid of getting a boner. What if that happens? It’s humiliating for a man. But sometimes that’s a natural reaction. The whole thing is uncomfortable for both parties nine times out of 10, and to have someone there to help with that discomfort can be a real gift.”
Another shift she’s witnessed has been starring in massive shows and films before and after the arrival of social media. Twitter was launched during Lost which ran for six seasons between 2004 and 2010. “So, in the early seasons, there was no Twitter. By the latter seasons Twitter was dictating some of the stuff that happened on the show. They would say, ‘The fans want this? Alright.’
“Then of course Instagram and TikTok and everything else came along and just took over the business to the point where now, what really gets you a job in Hollywood these days, unless you’re a very well-established actor, is not your talent, not whether you’re right for the role… it’s how many followers you have on social media and, are you in franchise films? It’s just sad, that’s a sad reality in Hollywood right now. It’s become too corporate.” She is no longer on Twitter.“ It’s not a fun place”.
Social media is tricky territory if you have strong opinions, which she does. “I have an idealism, I can’t seem to make sense of the world in all its faults and flaws and all the ways that things don’t work, I get incensed inside. I want it all fixed. Even though that’s not reality.”
I ask what issues have made her incensed. “I’ve publicly spoken against vaccine mandates, I’ve publicly said people should choose for themselves and for their own bodies, and of course that was not the popular opinion of the time, and people were very angry about it. But for me, my conscience dictated that I had to say what I thought was right.” That’s the same now? “Yeah.”
Lilly never really embraced acting. She was a model first, and unsure about swapping before landing Lost; she was thinking of giving up again when the opportunity to star in The Hobbit films came up, but it was one of her favourite books as a child and she couldn’t turn it down.
Even now she says acting is “still painful. For some people it really fulfils something in them, for me it drains everything out of me. I don’t get a lot back. There are other vocations that would be better for me. I don’t know why fate has decided this is the path, but I trust it and I’m on it and grateful, and really amazed and blessed by the fact I’ve been able to have the career I have.”
She says it’s rewarding when people want to talk to her about projects she’s worked really hard on “but it’s painful for me. I don’t love it.” When I ask if she would do another long running show like Lost, she shakes her head. “I can’t imagine it. It’s a major commitment, it takes over your life.
“It also changes your engagement with the world. One of the things that factors into my choices as an actor is how will this change my anonymity. I’m always seeking to protect my anonymity and remain in a quasi-normal life, which I think I’ve accomplished in spades. My kids have a very normal upbringing. I think it would shock people if they saw the house we live in and the schools they go to.” Her family – with partner Norman Kali and their two children – split their time between Hawaii and Lilly’s home country of Canada.
Today she is sporting a closely cropped hair style, very different from Wasp’s early look and even in the current film she grew it out a bit. She first shaved her head a few years ago “a number two buzz, just for fun”. She says, “It changed everything in a really good way. I think there’s this trap of the male gaze, that I can get very caught by. When you grow up and you’re a pretty girl and you get attention for that, then it can start to become too important and part of your identity that’s very hollow.
“Then there’s this pressure to maintain that, and make sure you’re always pleasing the male gaze. And I found myself one day really waking up to that and going, ‘I’ve never liked my hair. It’s too pretty, it’s boring’, and I’ve always admired women who were cool and had cool hair. I think short hair on a woman is sexy. It may not be to the average guy in Texas, but to me it’s sexy.”
At 43, she says “I’ve never felt more empowered. I’ve never been better at advocating for myself.” She hopes to be able to use her experience to guide younger people as she gets older. “I don’t feel I’m going to be put out to pasture, I don’t feel like the end is near. I feels this is a new beginning of a second journey in my life and I love it.”
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is in cinemas now
