Evangeline Lilly

Nicole Evangeline Lilly (born 3 August 1979) is a Canadian actress and author from Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta.

She gained popular acclaim for her first leading role as Kate Austen in the ABC series Lost (2004–2010), which garnered her a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama Series and won her a Screen Actors Guild Award.

In 2008, she starred as Connie James in the Academy Award–winning war film The Hurt Locker (2008). She and the cast won the Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Ensemble Cast and the Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association Award for Best Ensemble. She followed it with a role in the science fiction film Real Steel (2011).

In 2012, Lilly was cast as the Mirkwood elf Tauriel in Peter Jackson's three-part adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. The character, which does not appear in the original book by Tolkien, was created by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh as the head of the Elven guard who wields a bow and two daggers as weapons. Lilly, a fan of Tolkien's books since she was 13, underwent training for swordplay and archery for the role, and in the Elvish language. She appeared in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) and its sequel, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014).

Since 2015, she has portrayed Hope van Dyne / Wasp in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, starring in Ant-Man (2015), Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018). Both films received generally positive reviews with Lilly's performance being praised in the latter. In 2019, she reprised the role in Avengers: Endgame (2019). She also voiced an alternate version of Hope in the Disney+ animated series What If...? (2021). She voiced van Dyne in the episode, "What If... Zombies?!" and received positive reviews. She is set to reprise the role in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023).