|
By Christina Radish
 Possessing a delicate, almost fragile beauty, 24-year-old Australian actress Emilie de Ravin is quickly becoming one of
Hollywood
’s most visible actresses. After memorable roles on such cult series as
Roswell
and Beastmaster: The Legend Continues, de Ravin was cast as the pregnant plane crash survivor Claire on ABC’s television sensation Lost, which quickly became a worldwide phenomenon.
After she had finished her stint as the mysterious alien Tess Harding on
Roswell
, de Ravin admits that she wasn’t actively looking for another TV show, but was instead seeking any type of project that interested her, when Lost came along. The last of the regulars to make it out to the set in Hawaii, since she was out of the country working on another project, de Ravin put her audition on videotape, and hadn’t even gotten the chance to meet with any of the creators or producers before landing the role.
“TV and film are so different,” she says. “With film, I really like the fact that you have 100 pages in front of you, and that’s your script. Beginning to end, you can completely create your character around that, and you know everything that’s going to happen. TV goes on and on. You get your script, and then you get another one and find out something else that makes you think, ‘Oh, if I had known that back then, maybe that would have been different.’ But, Lost doesn’t have the classic problem of people getting bored with their character, or with who they’re working with. We have a cast of 14 people right now. My work is so sporadic. I’m working with different people all the time. There’s still so many people I haven’t even worked with. So, as an actor, it’s a lot more interesting than working with the same two characters, every week. And, we have a lot of episodes off because it’s such a big cast, so it’s great, in that respect.”
{quote_top} Because her work is so sporadic, de Ravin has made the decision to commute back and forth from her home in
Los Angeles
to the Lost set in
Hawaii
. “I’ve been in
L.A.
for a month because I’ve had a couple episodes off,” she says. “You’ll work every day on an episode for two weeks, or you’ll have an entire episode or two off. They’re usually not using the entire cast in each episode nowadays because there’s just too much going on. But, they’ll bring us all back together at the end of the season, as they did last year, to intertwine everything.”
Even with
Los Angeles
as her home base, de Ravin admits that she will always see
Australia
as her true home, especially since her family still lives there. “I’m really close with my family, so I miss them a lot,” says the former ballet dancer. “I’ve made
L.A.
my home now, but I just love the vibe in
Australia
. I grew up in
Melbourne
, which is a very cosmopolitan city that’s very easy to live in. It’s a friendly city with good food, but
L.A.
’s great too.”
Although de Ravin says that the cast members do have discussions with the show’s creators about what is going on with their characters, she reveals that they know just as little about what’s actually going on, on the island, as the audience does. But, since the characters are also kept in the dark, she feels that it works to their advantage.
{quote_middle}“I don’t mind that, unless it’s something in my back story that I should have known. The fact is, Claire doesn’t know what’s happening next week, so if you’re there doing that scene, you don’t want that in your head, anyway. I had a flashback reasonably early in the first season, about 1/3 of the way through, and I found out all about Claire then, and basically worked off of that.”
Much like the audience, when the Lost actors first get the scripts and learn about all the twists and turns the show is taking, they are often surprised at the directions the show takes. However, because of the popularity of the Internet, the risk of possible spoilers has become so great that the cast is sworn to secrecy, except maybe with their most immediate family.
 “We only get the scripts a couple days before we shoot, so it’s not that much in advance,” explains de Ravin. “The show does rely a lot on us being secretive about what happens because, otherwise, it’s kind of ruined. But, I can talk to my family about it because they wouldn’t say anything. I just can’t talk to the press.”
A couple of weeks ago, audiences got the opportunity to learn a bit more about Claire, when her character finally started to regain some of her memories about the time during which she had been abducted by Ethan (played by William Mapother), while she was still pregnant. Since then, de Ravin has had some time off in
Los Angeles
to spend with her fiancé, actor Josh Janowicz, with whom she plans to marry sometime this year.
“Everyone has their busy times, learning about their characters,” says de Ravin. “There’s been so much going on with the new people on the island, so they’ve had to put a lot of concentration on that, otherwise people wouldn’t know anything about them, and they wouldn’t be interested in watching their characters as well. But, I’m really excited to find out more about what the after-effects of her abduction are. The immediate thing is, yeah, the baby’s safe. But, I don’t yet know what happened with what Ethan was doing to Claire. They haven’t told me.”
Currently one of the highest rated shows on television, with numerous websites devoted to it, theorizing all of the possible upcoming storylines, Lost wouldn’t appear to be going off the air anytime soon. Though the cast had such a great feeling about making the pilot, it’s always hard to tell what will resonate with an audience.
{quote_bottom}“Everybody worked so well together and got along, even though it was such an eclectic cast,” says the self-proclaimed homebody. “And, it was such a different concept from anything that was out there at that time. But, you never know what the public’s going to want to watch. I think we came along at a time when there was a huge influx of reality shows, and people were craving something different. The audience likes it because it’s something that you can talk about, having interesting conversations and theorize about afterwards. There are so many different characters for different ages, races and nationalities to relate to.”
 One thing that looms over all of the actors on Lost is the fact that any of them could be killed off at any time, as evidenced by the deaths of the characters played by Maggie Grace (
Shannon
) and Ian Somerhalder (Boone). But, de Ravin says that that’s just part of the job, when you’re working on a show like theirs.
“One of the original ideas was to have a whole new cast for the second season,” she reveals. “People are going to die on the show because that’s the kind of show it is. Otherwise, it’s very unrealistic. You definitely have a supernatural thing going on with it, but apart from that, it’s a real drama and people have to die because there’s no hospital on the island.” |
