I was fortunate enough to be one of those stories where I was scouted on the street by somebody and actually refused to go to the agency, and was approached on different occasions and finally kind of caved and said, 'OK, I'll try it and see what happens.

If you watch a film from beginning to end, with no women in it, it's really difficult.

A month and a half after my first audition, I won the role on Lost.

I didn't grow up in a home that glorified Hollywood. We didn't watch TV. We didn't have a lot of magazines around.

When I got the job on 'Lost,' I was a broke university student living in the crappiest part of town, with a duct-taped back window on a broken-down car. I existed on peanut butter and tea.

The people on my mum's side of the family are atheist intellectuals who are ueber-proper. My dad's side of the family are missionaries who are more comfortable sitting around in sweatpants than they are in a five-star restaurant. But those two influences converged in my life.

One of the great pleasures of working in Middle Earth is you get to be another being.