Lost Claires Up a Big Mystery

Tonight on ABC's Lost (9 pm/ET), a crisis involving baby Aaron leads Claire to delve into the unsolved mystery of exactly what happened during her Season 1 kidnapping at the hands of ghoulish Ethan Rom (aka the Other man). TVGuide.com spoke to Aussie beauty Emilie de Ravin about Claire's new adventure, her "hard-to-handle" Lost leading man and her frighteningly fun new role.

TVGuide.com: I have to wonder, having often flitted between Australia and Los Angeles yourself, was it eerie to do a show about a doomed Oz-L.A. flight?
Emilie de Ravin: Yeah, kinda! I never really thought about it too much, though. I think it was more odd that Claire was the only Australian survivor. [Laughs]

TVGuide.com: I'm thinking the flight is grueling enough without having to worry about otherworldly interloping. So... as this week's Claire-centric episode gets underway, where is your character's head at?
De Ravin: Well, she's going through a lot with her baby not being too well, and that starts to bring back some flashes of repressed memories, and she's not really sure where they're from. Then it comes to light that they're from when she was kidnapped by Ethan. We really learn what happened to her during those days.

TVGuide.com: Do we learn everything, or are there some holes left?
De Ravin: In Lost tradition, there will be some holes, but it's pretty clear what happened to her when she was away. It clears up a lot of interesting things.

TVGuide.com: I'm glad to see them finally pick up this loose thread. And it was nice of Claire to wait for the tailies' stories to be told before she decided to ask herself, "What the hell happened to me?!"
De Ravin: [Chuckles] I know!

TVGuide.com: Are there any new flashbacks to Claire's preflight life?
De Ravin: No, we dealt only with on-island flashbacks to last season, when I was kidnapped. They haven't done an "all on-island" show before, so that was kind of cool.

TVGuide.com: And William Mapother is back as Ethan?
De Ravin: Yeah, and he's great. I have a lot of fun working with him.

TVGuide.com: You should have seen him as this alien infectee on Threshold. Dude is so good at playing bad.
De Ravin: He is; he's very creepy!

TVGuide.com: Was it fun to have Claire, Kate and Rousseau embark on this adventure?
De Ravin: Yes, it was a "little girl hike"! We don't need no men or guns! That was fun, trekking through the wet jungle and dealing with lots of bugs.

TVGuide.com: Claire is, after all, done with the pregnancy and getting back into fighting form....
De Ravin: Right, and getting ready to join the army. [Laughs] Leave the kid at home!

TVGuide.com: After this episode, will Claire be more active in her island existence?
De Ravin: I think that has progressively been happening, but she obviously has been held back by having a young baby. You can't endanger yourself too much for that reason. Plus, who do you leave your child with? There aren't too many people she'd leave the child with after what's been happening lately... losing Aaron every five minutes! She's very wary of that.

TVGuide.com: Going back to last season's Claire-centric episode, what's your take on what that psychic foresaw? Did he know Claire's plane would crash?
De Ravin: I think he did and I think Claire believes he did. But it was more of his overall belief that [whatever happened] would secure the situation in such a way that I would be forced to bring up the baby myself.

TVGuide.com: Does this week's episode shed any new light on that mysterious "need" for Claire to watch over Aaron?
De Ravin: No, it doesn't.

TVGuide.com: How has it been working with that leading man of yours? Baby Aaron, I mean.
De Ravin: You mean "the 20 faces of Aaron"? [Laughs] He changes weekly. There are back-up babies for when he needs to be screaming or if he needs to be happy.... And they can't work all day, so there are a couple that come in each day.

TVGuide.com: You make it sound like shipping produce. Is it always a local baby, or do they "import" them from L.A.?
De Ravin: No, that's what's hard, finding them on the island [of Oahu]. There are a fair amount of Caucasian babies, but not that many. And finding ones approximately the right age is the big problem. Some come to work who are just huge, like 6-month-old babies. Aaron is supposed to be, like, 4 to 4 1/2 weeks old.

TVGuide.com: I can see the Honolulu Star-Bulletin want ad now: "Needed: Baby That Ages One Hour per Month."
De Ravin: I know, right? It's kind of difficult to hold a baby who wants to sit up in a newborn position. They aren't too happy about that!

TVGuide.com: You played a pregnant alien on Roswell. Why do you think that show didn't do better? It seemed to have the right ingredients young beautiful people, sex, aliens.
De Ravin: I think they kept swinging back and forth a little too much between the sci-fi and the high-school drama. But it was an interesting show and it had a huge cult following.

TVGuide.com: Speaking of cult faves, you star in The Hills Have Eyes, opening March 10. That's a remake of a rather grisly film.
De Ravin: It's quite grisly, yes. [Laughs] It's a story of two families in the very basic sense  one that has been affected by nuclear testing and one that's just on vacation. When they collide, their short lives blend together in an interesting way.

TVGuide.com: I assume you're playing a "normal" family member?
De Ravin: I am, yes. I get chased but I also get to do some chasing. And I got to use a pickax, which is always fun.

TVGuide.com: You have something in common with Maggie Grace [ex-Shannon], who also went off and did a horror-film remake (The Fog).
De Ravin: A lot of people have been doing that. Ian [Somerhalder, ex-Boone] did one, and Josh [Holloway] did one.... Like, 9 out of 10 scripts we'd be getting were horror films. What really interested me about The Hills Have Eyes was the story behind it all. It's not just "kill a bunch of people" and that's it. There's quite an interesting undertone to it.

TVGuide.com: You also haveBrick coming out on March 31, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and directed by Rian Johnson. That's received some good notices.
De Ravin: Yeah, it's up for an Independent Spirit Award in a couple of weeks. I play Emily, this "sweet and impressionable girl."...

TVGuide.com: Awwww, come on. You need to be the badass for once!
De Ravin: Well, that's what The Hills Have Eyes is for! But Emily, she sort of crosses over to the wrong side of the tracks, thinking that she has to "fit in" with the cool people. She has a huge downfall and becomes this broken girl, and then "bad things" happen to poor Emily. It's very film noir, a very old-school detective story.