Why Evangeline Lilly Would Be Fine Never Acting Again
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ABC/Randy Holmes(NEW YORK) — Evangeline Lilly has contemplated quitting acting many times.
In fact, her real dream, she said, has always been to be a writer.
“I call it my day job,” she told Buzzfeed of being an actress. “You know, it pays the bills. It’s a great job. I’m grateful for it. But it’s not my passion.”
Lilly, 35, who landed her breakout role on the ABC series Lost in 2004, said that at the time, she wasn’t even sure she wanted to act professionally. A few years later, she decided she “really hated working as an actress.”
“I was like, ‘Well, then, what do I want to do if I don’t want to be an actress?’ Because I didn’t really mean to become an actress. I was sort of an accidental actress,” she said. “I wound up deciding that I wanted to make a go of a career as a writer.”
Ultimately, however, dream roles kept finding her. Lilly’s childhood passion for J.R.R. Tolkien was the catalyst for accepting her role in The Hobbit film franchise, as was her desire to play a strong female lead.
She then accepted a role in the upcoming Marvel film, Ant-Man, because of her desire to work with its star, Paul Rudd.
However, Lilly, who recently wrote a children’s book, The Squickerwonkers, isn’t planning on doing any other acting projects at the moment — not that she minds.
“There are so many reasons why, for me, writing is superior to acting,” she said. “One of them is anonymity. Writers can live relatively normal lives. Most [working] actors can’t. Writers can work from home and be near their family most of the time. Actors usually can’t. Writers expend a lot of intellectual energy, but not so much emotional energy. And I have intellectual energy coming out of my yin-yang, but emotional energy — I am so lazy. I just don’t have a lot of emotional energy to give. I don’t like drama in my life, and I don’t like having to pretend [to have drama].”
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