Buried somewhere among its multiple levels, could
Lost, which returned to Channel 4 this week, conceal a metaphor for the precarious lives of television actors? Strangers find themselves stranded on a tropical island (in British terms, say, the
EastEnders lot). They know little of one another’s dark histories (a spell, perhaps, in
Tracy Beaker) and have quickly to learn new roles. At all times their community faces obliteration (the show may fall down a ratings shaft and be cancelled) or they may be picked off individually by the Others (who inhabit a cave known as the writers’ room).
I haven’t thought this way before about US television’s gloriously nutty yet soberly delivered Lost. I do now that I am talking to its leading man, Matthew Fox, at his home in Hawaii, where he has moved his family for the latest run of the series. Fox is being talked about as the next George Clooney and in his unshaved, torn-jeans glory this morning he is as handsome, though he lacks the older actor’s sense of humour. My, is he earnest! Earnest and focused and cerebral! Midway through our talk, a postman arrives with a package from Amazon. It’s a book of chess puzzles, chess being his way of relaxing.
If you didn’t see the first season of Lost, I’d like to say that you’ll soon pick it up but really you won’t. There is so much going on: conspiracies, magic, stories told in flashback, metaphysical debate (there are actually characters called Locke and Rousseau). The premise is that a plane has crashed, stranding a group of lost souls on an island where nothing is what they expect. Actually, air crash apart, this turns out to be my experience of Hawaii, which on TV seems a sun-dappled paradise but while I’m there is as rainy and dreary as Skegness. When I potter down to the beach for a swim, signs warn of a sewage leak and severe risk of poisoning.
The nicest part of my brief visit is meeting Fox, a good-hearted, 39-year-old family guy who has been with his wife Margherita for nearly two decades. His home is scattered with evidence of his eight-year-old daughter Kyle, and Byron, 4, comes in from time to time. The youngsters look set for a Hawaiian childhood, since Lost has an option on their father for seven seasons.
Although its writers have few scruples about bumping off characters, Dr Jack Shephard is in all but name the star and will surely will be around for the denouement – if there ever is one.
“People say that but I don’t agree,” he says. “It’s important to the story to feel that everybody is at risk.”
So how was it when Boone, played by Ian Somerhalder, was killed? “That episode was brutal. Ian loved being on the show. We still talk to each other.” But he was hurt? “Oh yeah. And there’s going to be more of that. I guarantee it.”
Just as Jack Shephard is the “shepherd” of the lost flock on the island, Fox saw it as his responsibility to mentor the less experienced actors and host parties at his home. I get the impression that he is still confided in. Evangeline Lilly, who plays Kate and had barely worked as an actress before Lost, is handling her sudden fame well, he says (she is dating Dominic Monaghan, who plays Charlie, the former heroin addict). Jorge Garcia, the gargantuan Hurley, is working hard to lose weight for the sake of dramatic credibility (“he’s such an important element of the show, having that sweet soul with the humour on top of it”).
Humour is not one of Jack’s obvious qualities, but nor is he a bland hero. Fox describes him as a man who, in order to act, must overcome “his own eternal dislike of himself”.
Jack is also defined in opposition to others. Hurley represents fun; he stands for responsibility. Kate is a murderer; he is a surgeon who saves lives. Locke believes in fate and magic; Jack is a rationalist. Equally potent is the conflict between Jack and the outlaw Sawyer, the only guy on the island to get to first base with Kate.
In real life, Fox turns out to have a background not unlike the fictional Sawyer’s. Born in Philadelphia, where his father came from an “old” family, he was uprooted as a baby to a ranch in Wyoming. It was an isolated childhood and by his teenage years he was an apprentice redneck.
“Wyoming has a kind of outlaw feel. It’s almost like a last frontier: ‘I can do what I want; the Government’s off my ass; I can drink and drive if I like; I can carry weapons in my car.’ There’s so many ways that people can hurt themselves there. By the time I graduated from high school, ten friends had died in various ways: car accidents, suicide, fights, getting so drunk that they drowned. There were times when I drank heavily and caught that troublemaking fever. But I always felt that I could pull back from that.”
The person who pulled him back was his father, who gave his middle son the chance to repeat his last school year as a boarder at an East Coast prep school, Deerfield Academy. For Matthew this meant curfews, bed-checks and a coat and tie for breakfast, lunch and dinner: “It was Dead Poets Society.” But he learnt to study and was accepted by Columbia University, where he read economics. There he met Margherita, the Italian who was managing a coffee shop. Every now and again, as we talk, she appears to extract Byron from his father’s lap. She is a slim beauty who once modelled but, he says, found her vocation through children rather than work.
