Emilie in Toro Magazine March isssue

[Sydney]

Emilie de Ravin article in Toro Magazine:
http://www.toromagazine.ca/0306/emil...vin/index.html



Emilie de Ravin
By Chris Nuttall-Smith
Photographs by Darcy Hemley

She is the fragile one, the small one, the one they want to save. She walks slowly, delicately, with full red lips and pale, lustrous skin. Yet there’s always something more with Emilie de Ravin. Something taut, inside, as if each step could end with a demi rond de jambe. De Ravin was a ballerina before Hollywood got her. She will always cause our hearts to soubresaut. That she’s also the yummiest of television’s mummies? Maybe we’ll just take that bit as gravy.

Twenty-five now, she skipped from dancing with a ballet company in Australia to Hollywood in her teens. She started out as The Demon Curupira, prancing around the Gold Coast jungle in green body paint and an elf outfit that somehow managed, in spite of itself, to look comely. Who else could have made a show called BeastMaster watchable? Then on to Roswell, as the alien babe who suddenly found herself with child.

You’re more likely to know her from Lost. She’s Claire Littleton, the amnesiac Australian beauty, the screamer. She’s the one with the baby, that armful of newborn fright.
On the phone from L.A., de Ravin is still that young girl at first, quiet and a bit reserved, as deliberate with her thoughts as a dancer onstage. She’s not really afraid of flying, in spite of what her earlier profiles might tell you. Dying in a plane crash would be far too much of a clich?. “The only time I thought twice about it was when I was first flying to Hawaii, filming the pilot with half a real plane crashed on the beach. You know: fire, screaming, and dead people. And then hopping back on a plane to L.A,” she says. And no, she never thought that success in Hollywood would come easier than becoming a prima ballerina.

But then I mention an advance publicity photo I’ve seen from The Hills Have Eyes, the upcoming remake of the clash-of-civilizations horror that made Wes Craven famous. De Ravin plays Brenda Carter, the daughter, in an upright American family. The Carters take a driving trip across the California desert. All goes well until the inbred cannibals strike.

In the photo, she is the picture of resolve, of quiet, focused anger, and her eyes, mesmerizing and blue, stare off into the middle distance with intent. She looks like nobody’s little girl now. Her face and her ballerina’s neck are spackled red with somebody else’s blood. Though five-foot-two, she’s an ass-kicker now. The joy of it rings in her voice.
“I kill someone,” she explains. “I get splattered in the face.” She sounds happy, not so much the ballerina as the action-movie brute. “The good-old pick-axe-in-the-face-act,” she says, laughing.

“That sounds delightful,” I tell her.

“You mean you haven’t done that before?”

“Hasn’t everyone?” I ask.

“It’s great fun.”

So maybe she’s stronger than people think. Maybe her Claire Littleton will turn out that way as well. We hope so, now that Lost’s writers have started to pick off the beauties. “People are going to die,” she says. “That’s the kind of show it is. It’s an island with no hospitals and we have a monster. It’s kind of inevitable from day one that we’re not all going to be around forever. Whatever the show’s writers want to do can happen.”

They can’t kill her off, though – surely they can’t. Even Lost’s writers have to be rational. If there are any men left on the island, surely there will be a revolt.