Evangeline Lilly has revealed she has brain damage, months after she suffered a concussion when she fainted and fell face-first into a boulder.
The 46-year-old Canadian actor, known for her roles in Lost, The Hobbit films and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, shared the “bad news” video on her Instagram, one of many updates she has shared since she suffered the traumatic brain injury (TBI) in May, when she fainted on a beach and hit her head on a rock.
Lilly said in the video that a recent brain scan had revealed that “almost every area in my brain is functioning at a decreased capacity”.
“So I do have brain damage from the TBI and possibly other factors going on,” she said. “But now my job is to get to the bottom of that with doctors and then embark on the hard work of fixing it, which I don’t look forward to because I feel like hard work is all I do.
“But that’s OK. My cognitive decline since I smashed my face open has helped me to slow down and helped me to have a more restful finish to my 2025.”
In the caption, she said she found it “comforting to know my cognitive decline isn’t just perimenopause, discomforting to know what an uphill battle it will be to try to reverse the deficiencies”.
Her Marvel costar, the actor Michelle Pfeiffer, wrote: “You are a warrior. Nothing – not even this will defeat you my friend.”
At the time of the accident, Lilly shared photos of her bloodied face post-injury and described what had happened on Substack. “I pull my face from the sand and take a breath. My mouth and nose are full of blood,” she wrote. “My partner says that when I black out, I look like I die. He gets very afraid. My eyes roll back in my head and all life leaves my body.”
She explained how she had experienced fainting spells since she was a child, with doctors initially believing it was due to hypoglycemia, which was later ruled out.
“I have come to believe that this ‘checking out’ is a result of my little soul reaching her limit of what she feels she can cope with in this life, and she ‘leaves the building,’ so to speak,” she wrote.
But she also shared her gratitude, writing: “It might seem crazy looking at my face and my busted tooth, but I feel so grateful that I blacked out. I needed the reset.”
Lilly has been on hiatus from acting for three years, with her last role being superhero Hope van Dyne, or the Wasp, in the 2023 Marvel film Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. She told Variety in a statement in June that she was “not actively pursuing any work in the industry” and was now “devoting my time to my humanitarian work and my writing.”
