Call a function to unescape your escaped HTML. Depending on your case, you may choose to unescape your data and pass the result to the template or, as in this snippet, write the function call in the template:
var temp = _.template("<%= htmlDecode(name) %>");
function htmlDecode(input) {
var doc = new DOMParser().parseFromString(input, "text/html");
return doc.documentElement.textContent;
}
console.log(temp({ name: "<em>Test</em>" }));
http://jsbin.com/laretumiqa/edit?html,js,console,output
(the htmlDecode function comes from this question: Unescape HTML entities in Javascript?)