For more than two decades, Evangeline Lilly built a career inside some of Hollywood’s biggest and most fantastical worlds. She survived a mysterious island in “Lost,” fought alongside elves as the elf Tauriel in “The Hobbit,” and entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the superhero Wasp.
But at 47, the Canadian actress, author and mother of two said that despite her successful Hollywood career, her ambitions are now different.
“I retired from acting about five years ago,” Lilly told The Christian Post. “At my core, the thing that’s most important to me is my faith. What’s most important to me is philosophy and really thinking through the great questions, the big, huge, important questions in life.”
Those priorities are part of what drew Lilly to “Legend of Destruction,” a historical epic about the violent collapse of Jerusalem and destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. Lilly voices Queen Berenice, a Jewish ruler caught between her people, her faith and the political forces threatening Jerusalem, and also serves as an executive producer on the film.
According to Lilly, the project offered her something her blockbuster career, despite all its rewards and accolades, never could: the opportunity to engage directly with questions of faith, morality, biblical history and human nature.
“I’m so proud to have been a part of these huge, incredible franchises that I got to be a part of,” she said. “I think in so many ways they were important to a lot of people, and also they don’t really satisfy my passions.”
Directed by Gidi Dar, “Legend of Destruction” was originally released in Israel in 2021 and uses hand-painted images to tell the story of the Jewish revolt against Rome and the internal divisions that helped bring Jerusalem to ruin. Other stars who contributed their voices to the film include Oscar Isaac, Elliott Gould and Billy Zane.
Lilly, an outspoken critic of using artificial intelligence to replace human artists, shared how she first encountered the film before the AI explosion in film and media. The actress said the film’s reliance on paintings, sound, vocal ability and camera movement is a countercultural “celebration” of human artistry, particularly today.
“It still felt to me like this incredible act of revolution to take the beauty of these hand-painted oil paintings and bring them to life through story and sound and camera movements,” she said, calling the result something “unique and singular” that she had never seen before.
Watching the paintings move across the screen, she added, feels like sitting around a fire listening to a story while images unfold in the imagination.
“This is what human art does,” she said. “We lived this story as a species. It has our collective blood in it, and it is told by human hands through human imagination and human heart.”
For Lilly, the film, which has already won four Israeli Academy Awards and recently opened in the U.S., also provided an opportunity to highlight a little-known biblical story. Queen Berenice appears briefly in the Book of Acts (Acts 25–26) alongside her brother, King Agrippa II, and Lilly said she was fascinated by the real-life woman who wielded significant influence in a male-dominated world.
“She was still a woman caught in the middle of all of these warring male egos and all of this warring male power,” Lilly said.
The film depicts Berenice facing an agonizing conflict between preserving the Temple, and with it her religious and familial heritage, while also protecting her own political position and survival.
“She has to decide: Will I live, and will I survive, or will my people and the Temple?” Lilly said. “It’s a real impossible situation that she’s put in, and it tests her to her full limit.”
Lilly said she has long been fascinated by biblical women and has a passion for delving into their stories. She pointed to Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, whose story in Genesis is largely remembered through the violence committed against her.
“I find the same about Berenice,” Lilly said. “It was fun to have somebody fill out that picture. Who would she have been, and what would her life have been like, and what were the things she was wrestling with every day?”
Lilly shared how her own name carries a connection to her faith. She revealed how, as she became increasingly serious about her faith over the years, she researched the meaning of her name: Nicole Evangeline Lilly.
“It wasn’t until I became really passionately … dedicated to my faith that I was like, ‘I want to know what that name means,’” she recalled. “I found out it meant ‘victorious Evangelical bride of Christ,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a big responsibility.’”
Before working on “Legend of Destruction,” Lilly said she knew little about the destruction of the Second Temple or the broader Jewish history surrounding the event. But after researching the film, the actress said she was particularly struck by the proximity of the events to Jesus’ life and crucifixion.
“Underneath every spiritual story in the Bible is always a political story,” Lilly said. “In this film, you get to see how those two things converged in the worst possible way. … In this story, there’s so much eye for an eye, and in the end, everyone winds up blind.”
Lilly added that “Legend of Destruction” serves as a warning about what can happen when ideology becomes more important than recognizing the humanity of the person on the other side.
“We’re living in a time where our ideologies and our ideas are coming before our humanity and our ability to see the other person as worthy of love, worthy of God’s love, worthy of our love,” she said.
“We choose to be divided, and it always ends in destruction,” she added. “We could catch ourselves now before … that sort of ship has sailed, and it’s gone too far. … We’re all so exhausted from the hatred and the division and the pain and the suffering and the death and the war that is going on all over the world. I think we all long for a different path, for a different solution.”
“We don’t have to keep going down the path of destruction,” Lilly said. “We can choose another way.”
After more than 20 years in Hollywood, the Hawaii resident said she no longer feels compelled by the “rat race” of proving herself or seeking affirmation. These days, she focuses on writing, study, reading and projects aligned more closely with her passions.
“The most wonderful gift of getting older is finally being able to give your time to really what matters to you,” she said.
“The rat race of trying to make it in the world, trying to prove yourself, trying to show everyone how great you are and get that affirmation that you’re looking for, which is an important part of the first half of life, is done,” she continued. “And now it’s time really to nourish and nurture your community and the world. … I call myself an elder in training right now because I’m middle-aged. I take that really seriously. It’s important that I devote my time now to things that really, really matter to me.”
“Legend of Destruction,” she said, is that kind of worthwhile project. She emphasized that through the film, she wants viewers to recognize something uncomfortable about themselves in its characters and understand the power of extending grace.
“Every single person in the film believed they were right, and every single person in the film did something very wrong, believing the whole time that what they were doing was righteous and good,” she said.
“We all think we are right, and we know, and the other person’s wrong, and they’re evil,” she said. “We’re human and flawed, and we [mess] up, and we’re going to do things wrong. … It is only by grace that the world has kept turning and humanity has survived. And so, just to remember that grace that is given to us should be passed on to our neighbor and our enemy.”
Leah M. Klett is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: [email protected]
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