Little Girl Lost

On an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, strange things are happening, things not usually seen on network television. We refer, of course, to the Hawaiian island of Oahu, overrun by a marauding pack known as the cast of TV's hottest show, Lost.

"One night, we had all gone bowling," says Evangeline Lilly, 26, who plays the show's female lead, the beautiful but mysterious criminal Kate. "Most people left, so it was myself, Matthew [Fox], Jorge [Garcia] and Dominic [Monaghan] -- three goofy, out-there guys. So we're in the middle of a parking lot in Kailua, daring each other to do things. Jorge turns to me and says, 'I'll give you twenty dollars if you pee in that garbage can.'" Lilly flashes her America's-sweetheart grin. "Thirty seconds later, I've got my pants down and my bum hanging into this garbage can, and he has to give me twenty dollars."

Lilly laughs loudly. "I don't have a lot of inhibition," she adds, somewhat unnecessarily.

With her freckles and curly brown hair, Lilly has the wholesome/sexy good looks of Kate Beckinsale, or maybe a particularly convincing spokeswoman for a dating chat line (one of her past gigs). She also looks phenomenal in a bikini -- a fact that Lost's producers haven't been shy about taking advantage of. Lilly has become the ultimate desert-island fantasy of 2005 -- the tough girl with improbably well-conditioned hair who could kill you a boar but still look fabulous at the end of the day.

Lost is the strange, addictive, highly unlikely hit show that cross-pollinates Survivor, Twin Peaks and Gilligan's Island: an airplane traveling from Sydney to Los Angeles makes a crash landing on a remote island, leaving forty-eight survivors and a lot of luggage. The island has a whole lot of unexplained hazards, including a murderous tribe of "Others," a polar bear, an invisible monster and a weird goddamn hatch in the ground. Conjecturing about the show's overarching secrets -- It's a government experiment! It's purgatory! -- has become an obsession among fans, one that's reached a fever pitch going into the second season, which premiered on September 21st.

As if all that weren't complicated enough, every episode features one or two of the characters in flashbacks, showing what their life was like before the island. "Our characters are designed to be enigmatic," says Damon Lindelof, Lost's co-creator and executive producer. "We wanted to populate the island with people who didn't want to talk about themselves." They went on the prowl for likable, little-seen actors with a hint of mystery.

In a large cast filled out by unknowns -- Party of Five veteran Matthew Fox stood as the biggest star -- Lilly was the ultimate novice. She grew up in small towns in western Canada; her only previous acting experience was a handful of commercials and a few jobs as an extra in projects shooting in Vancouver, like Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital and White Chicks. Her father was a grocery-store produce manager, and her mom ran a day-care center out of the house. Raised Baptist and Mennonite, Lilly taught Sunday school for eight years, and one of her first jobs out of high school was as a flight attendant for a "really shitty airline." Not exactly typical network-TV-star material.