Entertainment Weekly
November 3, 2006

“Well,” she says, cheerfully excusing herself, “I’m going to go shoot someone.”

Cameras rolling, she expertly wields a Sig Sauer and pumps two bullets into someone shocking: the still-standing are left gasping as she coldly lowers the gun.  After multiple takes, Mitchell hurries back to apologize for the interruption.  Asked how she goes from delightful to frightful like that!, she smiles and shrugs: “You can be nice and be a badass, you know?”

We’re certainly starting to.  Mitchell’s Juliet – the Jack-hammering fertility doctor who belongs to that eerie cult, the Others – has emerged as one of the prime time’s most captivating new characters: Juliet is soothing, conflicted, clinical, ferocious, and maybe a smidge flirty, while keeping her intentions murkier than swamp water.  It’s a performance that could vault Mitchell beyond I-know-I-know-her-from-somewhere territory, a nifty feat for a 36-year-old actress who’s bounced around for more than a decade in project memorable (Gia) and ephemeral (Significant Others).  But trying to convince her of such a possibility is akin to coaxing answers from an Other.  “Oh, God, I can’t even imagine in any way, shape, or form that I’d ever break through,” she says incredulously.  “I’m such a chameleon; I don’t think there’s enough people can latch onto.  I think of myself as an oddity.”

The daughter of Dallas lawyers, Mitchell grew up a theater-nerd loner.  “I never had any big Hollywood dreams,” she says, sprawled out barefoot on an East Oahu beach near the home she shares with her improv comedian husband, Chris, and 1-year-old son, C.J.  “There was nobody going, ‘You’re going to be a star!’  It was more like, [sweetly patronizing] ‘Oh, you do love it, don’t you?’  I had terrible acne, frizzy hair, and I was scrawny and paunchy at the same time…I definitely didn’t take Hollywood by storm.”

More like intermittent showers.  After studying theater at London’s British American Drama Academy, she landed on the soap Loving in 1994, but was fired a few months later (“I was hated, maliciously hated, by the fans”).  She gained attention as Angelina Jolie’s bisexual lover in the 1998 HBO movie Gia and as a lesbian psychiatrist on ER two years later.  Before, in between, and after, there were short-lived series (L.A. Firefights, The Lyon’s Den) and big-screen supporting parts, like the stern principal-turned-Mrs. Claus in The Santa Clause 2, a role she reprises in the new release The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause.

Christmas came early this summer when Mitchell auditioned for Lost and impressed producers with her reading of the interrogations scene, in which Jack stands on a table and yanks on a chain while Juliet tells him to stop.  “The scene is basically, ‘Get off the f---ing table because it’s futile!’ but somehow she made it seem like a mommy talking to a small child who’s banging his head against the wall,” marvels Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof.  “There was something so disquieting about it.”  The producers were also taken with her arm cast; a fall from a ladder had left her with a fractured write and broken toe, the latter of which she reset herself.  Exclaims Mitchell: “I’m telling you, I’m a weirdo!”