Little Girl Lost

J.J. Abrams, executive producer and co-creator of Lost, rejected actress after actress for the role of Kate, insisting that they would find the alluring unknown they were looking for. Just two weeks before shooting was set to begin on the pilot, he saw Lilly's audition tape and proclaimed her to be both beautiful and goofy -- exactly the girl he wanted. But could she handle it? Before Lilly took the part, Abrams looked her in the eye and said, "You have no idea what's about to happen. If you don't really want this, run." Lilly avoided his stare and muttered that she was ready, thinking that if she didn't like making the pilot, she'd just go back to college and finish her international-relations degree. Turns out she may never get that degree after all.

"She's amazing," Fox says. "Stepping into the lead of a show with no experience? Her poise and confidence are remarkable."

According to Lilly, Fox tells her something different. Between takes on location, she'll shinny up a vine or maybe eat a slug on a dare, at which point she will receive a steely Fox gaze: "He's constantly looking at me and saying, 'Evie, do you realize you're really weird?' And then he'll just walk away."

Abrams (currently shooting Mission: Impossible 3 in Europe ) says that Lilly's inexperience kept cropping up in Season One; she'd rehearse her scenes at home and then feel off-balance when actors on the set made choices she hadn't expected. "It reminded me how wildly green she was," he says. "And she had mannerisms she had to unlearn, like crinkling up her forehead in a crazy way."

In a show with one mystery piled on top of another like a teetering Jenga tower, Kate's secrets have been central blocks, if confusing ones. In the course of the first season, viewers learned she had killed the man she loved, knocked over a bank to recover a toy airplane from a safe-deposit box and been on the lam for another, unspecified crime (hopefully one that makes more sense).

"I want to see Kate's psychotic side come out," Lilly says of Season Two. What she doesn't want: any more scenes where she sits on the beach pining for Fox's character, the good doctor Jack. "How many times have you seen Kate staring into the ocean, and suddenly Jack walks up and sits down beside her and they have a heart-to-heart?" she complains. "It became laughable. I would say, 'No, no, no way, not again, I'm not doing it.' And the director would say, 'Come on, do it for me, one more time.'"

Lost is that strangest of phenomena: a cult show with blockbuster ratings. Although it had an annoying habit of alternating excellent episodes with mediocre ones, it finished its first season at Number Fourteen in the Nielsens. But previous shows built around Big Mysteries have a way of going sour: Although The X-Files limped on for nine full seasons, it became tiresome after only five; Twin Peaks collapsed in Season Two, after viewers were told who killed Laura Palmer. The big trick for the Lost producers: Keep things puzzling enough to intrigue the audience, but not enough to frustrate the shit out of them. "That's the tightrope walk," says Lindelof. "Sometimes we get frustrated ourselves and decide it's time to download a big chunk of mythology. And then the audience says, 'I find this confusing and alienating and too weird.' So then we pull back, and they say, 'You're not giving us enough.'"