Evangeline Lilly, who plays the beauteous Kate on "Lost," confesses she's part gypsy. It was that restless spirit that almost made her turn down the chance to co-star in the ABC hit television series. It was the same wanderlust that has kept her on the move.

"As soon as I left high school, I cut my ties with everyone I knew and took off to a new city, and I started again," says Lilly, seated at a small, round table in the corner of a dark bar in a Pasadena, Calif., hotel.

"I moved (between) towns in British Columbia. I remember saying to myself when I got to this new town, 'You can be anyone you want to be now. Nobody knows you. Nobody has an expectation of you. So you CHOOSE who you want to be.' And choosing who you want to be is a very different thing than feeling like you just are who you are."

For the next three years, Lilly moved to six different places, each time assuming a new persona.

"I tried out six different personalities and characters. It was really an amazing time, very lonely but very formative — Kelowna and White Rock and Vancouver — it was usually a five-hour driving radius, but still, people didn't know me. And what came out of that was I got a piece of this person and a piece of that person and a piece of that person and formulated the person I wanted to be from all those different characters I tried on."

Those experiences taught her not to care what other people think. "That was very empowering," says Lilly, who's wearing a multicolored sweater cut to the naval, blue denim pants and black patent pumps.

"Of course, as an adolescent, you care very much what people think of you. I always felt like not only did I care what people thought of me, I was a very faithful Christian as a teenager.

"I cared very much what the church thought of me and what God thought of me, what my parents and my peers thought of me and what the entire world thought of me. Because I felt that was my spiritual responsibility, and that was something I had to let go of when I realized I'm responsible to myself and to God and that whatever anyone else in the world thinks — even if they're the church — does not matter."

Lilly, who longs to be a writer, wasn't sure she wanted to act. She had no designs on becoming a model, either. But she found herself doing commercials to pay her way through college. "It was the most degrading work I've ever done," she shakes her head.

"I've been a grease monkey, a flight attendant, a waitress — lots of different odd jobs, but that job was so degrading because their version of what an audition is, is you show up in a room looking as pretty as you can look, and a man who spends all day looking at pretty women looks you up and down and sizes you up and makes a decision based on whether you flirt with him or whether you're pretty enough or whether you go with him for a drink afterward," she says.

"And I would have none of that. I would always walk in, say my name and walk out. I had no interest in being part of that. I still got jobs, but I could feel what I was involved in. I could feel the energy around me that was just putrid and I eventually — with great offers on the table — said to my agent, 'I will not take one of those jobs. I will not do another day of commercial work another day in my life again.' "

For a while, she worked as an extra, toting her school books with her while she waited on set to move in the background of a scene.

"I used to watch the actors and actresses and think: 'I'm am SO glad I am not you,' " she says, laughing. " 'I am so glad. I can just sit back here, do my work and not have anyone pay any attention to me. You poor things.' Cut to three years later."

Of course, three years later "Lost" arrived, and Lilly, 27, finds herself at the center of the media frenzy that has dogged the show. When her house in Kailua burned down last year, she says, she was mortified to find the paparazzi, like jackals, eager to scavenge for her personal memorabilia. The crowd was held at bay by the police until she could go through the incinerated remains of her life.

She's been romantically linked with "Lost" co-star Dominic Monaghan, but refuses to say whether they are engaged (she wears no ring). "I try not to talk about my private, personal love life in the press because I'm a firm believer that given an inch, they will swim all over it," she says.

"I always keep really mum about my love life. I've seen so many tabloids where they have a beautiful picture of a couple and they tear a line down the middle."