‘Lost’ actress finds power in the ‘Hills’

FIRST impressions can be deceiving. Especially in the case of “Lost’s” Emilie de Ravin.

Scurrying into a coffee bar in Toluca Lake 20 minutes late -- De Ravin was stuck in traffic -- the actress seems fragile, almost waiflike. Tiny -- she’s 5 feet 2 -- the 24-year-old Australian has that same gamin quality of the young Audrey Hepburn or Leslie Caron. Just like those two legendary performers, De Ravin was also a ballet dancer.

So it’s all the more surprising that her two upcoming movie roles call for her to conjure up an inner strength that doesn’t seem possible coming from such a small-boned frame.

In the new horror film “The Hills Have Eyes,” which opens Friday, De Ravin plays a precocious teenager named Brenda who is angry that she’s on a road trip with her family across the barren, hot desert.

When they are stranded in the desert after their car and camper are damaged in a crash, they are confronted -- and several members of the family brutally murdered -- by a group of cannibalistic mutants.

After Brenda is raped by two of the bloodthirsty mutants, her rage leads her to killing one of them with a pickax to the head.

“I love well-done horror films,” De Ravin said. “There are a lot of horror films I dislike because I find they forget about the story and just go for the scare factor.” With “Hills,” she said, “there are some really visual shots that are so well done.”

Though the film, which is based on the Wes Craven classic, is set in New Mexico, it was produced in Morocco.

“It’s so insanely different than anywhere I had been before,” she said. “We shot in a very small desert town with barely any water around. The cheat was so perfect for the desert here in the States. The hills are so huge, you are a little more frightened there for some reason. Everything is a little more scary.”

Director Alexandre Aja said it was difficult to find an actress who could play such an “extreme” part -- “to be able to go from the normal life situation to the more extreme screaming, crying, being raped and being witness to murder.”

WHAT impressed Aja about De Ravin is that she did all three scenes he had selected for the actresses auditioning back-to-back without a break. “In almost two seconds she was another character,” he said.

Aja also liked the fact he could play off her fragility. “She looks so tiny that you don’t believe she has this inner strength inside her. For a filmmaker, it’s amazing that you can really play with that cliche of being fragile and at the end you reveal her inner strength.”

In the Sundance Award-winning indie film noir “Brick,” De Ravin plays another teenager -- this time drowning in a sea of drugs, sex and murder.

In the film, which opens March 31, she plays a high school student named Emily whose murder leads her ex-boyfriend on a search to find her killers.

Director Rian Johnson auditioned a lot of actresses for the role -- he needed an actress who could make a lasting impression in her few short scenes.

“We hadn’t found an actress close to the shooting,” he said. “We were kind of panicking at the end. This particular character had to have a really delicate balance of strength and fragility. She was a very strong girl who at the point we meet her as been broken down to the almost breaking point.”

When De Ravin came in and read, “I just got so excited,” Johnson . “When you meet her she’s so tiny and feminine, but she’s such a strong person that that just shines few.”

De Ravin exudes a sophistication and worldliness that in all likelihood stems from her extensive travels: After landing a role as a teenager in the syndicated series “Beastmaster,” which shot in Australia, she left home and moved to Los Angeles on her own at 18 after being cast as an alien in the short-lived TV show “Roswell.”

THOUGH “Lost” films in Hawaii, she hasn’t moved there, preferring to fly back to Los Angeles whenever she’s not working to be with her fiance, actor Josh Janowicz, and her teacup poodle, Bella.

She is guarded about their relationship, declining to say even whether they’ve set a date for the wedding.

“She’s very independent,” said “Lost” executive producer Bryan Burk. “ ‘Feisty’ is the wrong word, but she’s strong. She’s engaged and she’s trying to make that relationship work. He’s an actor as well. She is committed to the show, but in that same respect it makes it more difficult for her to do the show because she hasn’t moved to Hawaii. But at the same token, she does it just as well as everyone else.”

De Ravin doesn’t mind the flying back and forth from Hawaii to the mainland, she said, because it gives her a chance to read, study her lines and just relax.

In the Emmy Award-winning ABC series, De Ravin plays Claire, a single Australian woman who gives birth to a son shortly after the jetliner she was a passenger on crashes on a mysterious island.

Before delivering her baby, Claire was kidnapped by the “Others” on the island. In last week’s episode, viewers learned what happened to her when she was taken away from the rest of the survivors.

“It was quite a creepy episode,” she said. “It was great.”

De Ravin has bonded quiet nicely with Claire. “I love the fact that she’s very independent and a strong young woman,” she said. “There aren’t a lot of empathetic characters out there for young actresses. She is really trusting, but she’s not stupid about it. She has a very grounded personality.

The last of the regulars on the series nearly two years ago, De Ravin didn’t even get a chance to meet with any of the creators or producers before landing the role.

De Ravin was out of the country on another project so she had to put her audition on tape. “It’s kind of an odd thing doing that,” she said. “It was a little scary, but fun.”

“Emilie was the last one cast” as a regular, Burk said.

Though she turns 25 this year, De Ravin doesn’t mind being being cast as a teenager in her upcoming films. “It’s fun playing Claire, who is quite mature for her age,” she said. “But it’s fun going back and drawing from memory the things you would do and wouldn’t do [as a teen].”