Like so many working actors, Elizabeth Reaser has endured her share of maddening pilot seasons. “Oh my God, it was just insane: pounding the pavement, going on a gazillion really bad auditions, and just being humiliated day in and day out and never even getting a test or a callback or anything,” she recalls. “Just complete desperation followed by despair. It was years of that.”

Things went a little differently this time around. Fresh off her Emmy- and Screen Actors Guild Award-nominated turn as troubled Grey’s Anatomy amnesiac Ava/Rebecca Pope, Reaser landed the lead role in CBS’s buzzy new series The Ex List. And yet she doesn’t feel all that removed from the crushing lows of previous years. “I don’t feel like, ‘Oh, cool, I’m here, it’s done,’ ” she says.

At least two of this season’s other potential breakout stars also can’t quite believe they’ve come so far. Kyle Bornheimer, who plays a disaster-prone nice guy in CBS’s Worst Week, confesses that taking center stage on a soon-to-premiere show is a little surreal. “We start shooting Episode 2 in a few weeks, and I still feel like I’m auditioning,” he says, chuckling.

And Anna Torv, who nabbed the central role in über-producer J.J. Abrams’ much-anticipated sci-fi series Fringe, notes that the anxiety she felt stepping onto the set the very first day of filming hasn’t necessarily abated. “I still get nervous,” she says, laughing. “I do. I don’t know why.”

All three actors worked hard to reach this thrilling career moment: a leading part in a high-profile new series. For the Australian-born Torv, who traveled halfway around the world for the opportunity, it’s a reminder that even the most far-fetched dreams are ultimately possible. “You always think that things are so far away — so out of reach,” she says. “But they’re not.”

…

While Reaser and Bornheimer were experiencing the pilot-season gauntlet, Torv was half a world away, chilling out in her native Australia. She was initially thinking of journeying to the States for pilot season, but when the writers strike hit, she decided to hold off. “I thought, I’m just gonna save my money and sit it out, maybe go over later,” she recalls.

The move proved to be fortuitous. Australia-based casting director Tom McSweeney, who has worked with Torv before, got a call asking him to put actors on tape for the Fox series Fringe. He sent in an audition Torv had done for another show. A couple of rounds of auditions later, she had the part. The actor is quick to sing the praises of McSweeney and Fringe CD April Webster; without them, she says, she wouldn’t have nailed it. “I’ve lived in the U.K. and in Australia, and you’re always testing for things overseas,” she says. “Tom’s on the Gold [Australia's East] Coast, which is where my mother is, and sometimes if I’m on holiday with Mom, I’ll pop in, and he’ll help me put things down on tape and send them off. I really credit that warm kind of environment with being able to do good work.”

This is Torv’s first American role, and it’s a doozy. She plays Olivia Dunham, a flinty FBI agent who teams with a possibly insane scientist (John Noble) and his estranged son (Joshua Jackson) to investigate unexplained phenomena. “She’s ridiculously focused and ridiculously determined,” says Torv. “She’s living in a man’s world, and it’s quite fun to not be constantly playing the love interest. That’s what you get a lot of the time; you’re playing these flirtatious scenes or you’re going on dates or you’re dressed up. I love that she’s practical. She wears suits, and she doesn’t wear lipstick; she just does her job.”

Torv, who is repped by Endeavor, is a veteran of Australian TV, with regular roles on popular series such as The Secret Life of Us and Young Lions. She initially wasn’t sure if her experience would translate to American television, particularly because Fringe is laden with big sci-fi story lines and special effects. “Lots of the stuff that I’ve done in Australia’s been really kind of conversational drama, set in apartments over a coffee table,” she says. “But as far as the actual technicality and the working of it, it’s kind of the same, really: You hit your mark, and it takes the same people to make it, so all the jobs are the same. [That] was a massive relief. Then you go, ‘I can do that.’”

Torv can’t remember when she was first inspired to start acting. “I hate it when people answer [that question] and they’ll go, ‘Oh, I just one day decided,’ ” she says, chuckling. “You go, ‘God, I worked really hard! How did you fall into it?’”

She recalls performing in amateur theatre on the Gold Coast and was eventually accepted into the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney. “It’s a great school, because you have voice classes and movement classes, and you get little tidbits about all the different kinds of methods and techniques, but then fundamentally, you just actually perform plays,” she says.

These days she’s just trying not to think too hard about all the expectations attached to Fringe thanks to Abrams’ high-profile name. Instead she’d rather marvel at the way the world of auditioning is evolving, allowing talented overseas thespians like herself to land projects that might have previously been out of reach. Thanks to technical advances like, say, the ability to tape and email auditions in the blink of an eye, the opportunities aren’t as rare as they might have once been. “It’s a really new and fantastic world,” she says.

“An audition you’ve done in Australia, they can watch it in the States within an hour. But also, I think, the world’s opening up. It’s exciting for [Australians] because you keep seeing more and more people that are working internationally in lots of different countries — and not just the big massive movie stars like Mel Gibson but, you know, jobbing actors. It’s become more fluid, I think.”

Anna Torv:
Recently relocated from Australia to New York, where Fringe is shot
Did motion capture for the video game Heavenly Sword alongside Andy “Gollum” Serkis
Other credits include the British series Mistresses and the upcoming World War II miniseries The Pacific, executive-produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks

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