Evangeline Lilly suffers brain damage following serious head injury

Posted On January 5, 2026January 5, 2026

Actor Evangeline Lilly has revealed she has suffered brain damage following a serious head injury she sustained on a beach last year.

The Canadian star, who has previously appeared in The Hobbit, Lost and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, shared the news on her Instagram on January 3rd, as the latest update to her followers amid her ongoing recovery. 

Lilly suffered a concussion after fainting and falling face-first into a boulder while on a beach in May last year, which has had lasting repercussions on her health. She has now subsequently revealed the “bad news” that following a recent scan, “almost every area in my brain is functioning at a decreased capacity”.

She said: “So I do have brain damage from the TBI [traumatic brain injury] and possibly other factors going on,” before adding, “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.”

Despite this, Lilly said she was “OK” with the prospect of her rehabilitation as “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.”

At the time of the accident, the actor wrote on Substack that she has experienced spells of fainting since she was a child, but in terms of that particular incident, she recalled: ““I pull my face from the sand and take a breath. My mouth and nose are full of blood.”

Lilly added: “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.”

The actor has not appeared on screen in the past three years after she stepped away from Hollywood. Her most recent role was in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in 2023.

She told Variety in June last year that she was not looking to return to the industry as she was now “devoting my time to my humanitarian work and my writing.”

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