Cineplex.Com Interview: "She’s the One"

It’s as if Emilie de Ravin’s been stranded on a desert island for the past few years. How else can you explain the Australian actor’s complete naiveté about what she was getting into when she signed up for the romantic drama Remember Me…opposite Twilight’s Robert Pattinson?

“I, sort of, I guess I’d sort of heard about [Twilight],” the 28-year-old explains over the phone from her L.A. home. “But not being actively involved, you know, when it doesn’t affect you, you’re sort of out of the loop.”

Uh, sure.

To be fair, de Ravin was actually stranded on a desert island before she signed onto Remember Me last spring — caught up in her own pop-culture phenomenon, TV’s supernatural plane-crash drama Lost. She plays Claire, the young Australian who gave birth in the show’s first season, disappeared in the fourth season, but comes back — “in a very unexpected fashion,” she says — in the show’s sixth and final season, which is now airing.

And, it’s true, she did sign onto Remember Me late, just a couple of weeks before shooting began. “They originally had been looking for anyone but someone like me — the character was originally written Latina — so it was quite last minute that I signed on to this, and then it was this whirlwind from there,” she says. That whirlwind involved paparazzi pics of every touch she and Pattinson shared on set, which were then splashed across the web, and the inevitable rumours the pair was involved off-screen, too.

Still, it’s not like Pattinson signed on at the last minute. He’d been attached from the get-go. “I didn’t know that when I read it,” says de Ravin. “I just fell in love with the script.”

That script follows the unlikely romance between angst-ridden New Yorker Tyler (Pattinson, channelling James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause) and Ally (de Ravin), a girl with her own set of problems. Their relationship starts out on a dare after poor, misunderstood Tyler is arrested for mouthing off to a cop following a street fight. The real story is that Tyler was just coming to the aid of a guy in trouble, of course, but Officer Craig (Chris Cooper) doesn’t see it that way. So to get back at the cop, Tyler hits on his pretty daughter, and one thing leads to another, fireworks alight, breathing becomes laboured and a tortured romance blooms. Perfect.

“It’s basically a romantic tragedy,” says de Ravin. “It focuses a lot on family, the importance of living life to the fullest and realizing how important every moment is with the people you love.”

De Ravin became the first woman Pattinson would love — on screen, anyway — since falling for Twilight’s moody human Bella (Kristen Stewart). Which meant fans, paparazzi and the gossip rags were going to be unusually interested in this little film. The cast and crew were surrounded by swarms of onlookers throughout the production, and since they were filming on the streets of New York, instead of some cozy, sequestered studio, the frenzy was almost impossible to control — making it hard to stay focused.

“I remember Rob and I were rehearsing a scene at night and we were walking around so it was very accessible for people, and photographers, to be filming and taking pictures,” says de Ravin. “We just sort of stopped and said, ‘Do you know what we’re doing right now?’ You become so self-conscious of what’s going on around you, and all these eyes on you, that you forget — ‘What scene are we doing again?’”

As for the unconfirmed rumours that de Ravin was romantically involved with Pattinson during the shoot (despite the unconfirmed rumours that Pattinson is involved with his Twilight leading lady Stewart; and the unconfirmed rumours that de Ravin reunited with her estranged husband, American actor Josh Janowicz), de Ravin declines comment.

“I just really don’t read any of that stuff and prefer not to talk about it because it’s not part of my job and not why I’m doing this,” she says. “People write what they want in the tabloid world. It doesn’t matter what you say, it’s probably more interesting, the things they write up, because my life’s really not that interesting [laughs].”

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