Elizabeth Mitchell Interview
Apr 13th, 2007
A Lostie lives among us.
She is Elizabeth Mitchell, evil — or is she? — Juliet. That “Other”/fertility doc who kept Jack captive, torturing him with her knowledge of his past, and feeding him grilled sandwiches. She ends up helping Kate and Sawyer escape, gets this close to being executed (she’s branded instead) and appears to be Jack’s newest best friend. Then last week we saw her expelled from Other-land, unconscious and then, out-of-sorts in the jungle, cuffed to none other than Kate. A muddy messy fight ensued.
“Lost” is shot in Hawaii, which is where Mitchell recently telephoned from during a day off. At her house on Oahu, her 1 ½-year-old-son C.J. had just been put down for a nap and she was looking forward to watching an episode of the show at the house of cast member Jorge Garcia (who plays Hurley) later that evening.
Q: Your acting roots are in soaps?
A: Actually, my roots are in theater. I did a soap for maybe three months. And then I got fired from a TV job (”L.A. Firefighters”). I don’t think they liked me. I didn’t realize what a blessing it was. At the time it’s horrific and you think, “I shouldn’t be doing this.” Rejection just builds you up. And then you build up your own ego. And you build up your own way of getting back in and you just do it. When I got fired I booked “Gia.” The right door opened.
Q: How did playing Angelina Jolie’s lover, or Mrs. Kris Kringle, or Teresa Earnhardt (in “The Dale Earnhardt Story”) help you with the role of Juliet?
A: Everybody really pretty much helped me. Having a baby helped me. It’s about getting to a place where I am unafraid as an actress. I don’t think I would have been able to play her (Juliet) if I were in my twenties. They wrote me a humdinger of a role and she continues to be that way.

Even in death, Lost’s most reviled castaways can’t get any peace. In the March 28th episode, Nikki (Kiele Sanchez) and Paolo (Rodrigo Santoro) — who were clumsily introduced at the beginning of season three and never forgiven for it — were revealed to be diamond-grubbing murderers who, in one of the series’ darkest twists to date, were paralyzed by spider bites and unwittingly buried alive by show heroes Sawyer and Hurley. Response to the episode proved bitterly divided, with viewers and online bloggers falling into two distinctly polarized camps: Those who felt the episode was an unwelcome disruption to the show’s main storyline; and those who felt it was a clever acknowledgment of fan frustration that amounted to, as Hurley said, “one of the most awesome hours of television ever.” (Among the episode’s many inside jokes: Sawyer’s “Who the hell’s Nikki?” crack, and Nikki’s plea to Paolo upon seeing dead step-siblings Shannon and Boone: “Promise me we’ll never end up like them.)
In the two most recent episodes of “Lost,” John Locke told a few lies, killed an “Other,” blew up a hatch full of communication devices and then set off more explosives in the Others’ submarine to prevent anyone from leaving or arriving on the island. It’s a far cry from the weeks he spent in a hole in the ground last season, punching computer buttons, only to emerge feeling like he wasted his time.

