Ah, paradise. That was Matthew Fox’s reaction when he discovered that “Lost,” his compelling new castaways series on ABC, would be shot entirely in Hawaii.
Then came the pilot.
“The first day, we shot the jungle scene where Jack, Kate and Charlie are running from the Big It,” says the actor who plays heroic surgeon Jack Sheppard. The Big It is the ferocious, behemoth, as yet unseen, that is stalking him and other survivors of a plane crash on a deserted tropical island.
“We were freezing, and they were dousing us with fire hoses to thicken the rain. The three of us were up to our shins in mud, shivering. I remember thinking, `This is the furthest thing from what I assumed shooting in Hawaii would be like.’ “
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At this point, Fox, 38, has come to expect the unexpected from the hit series. Each week, the scripts introduce new shockers about the characters (Sayid served in Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard in Tikrit?) and about the island (how many South Pacific atolls have polar bears roaming around?).
Even “Lost’s” success–it trails only “Desperate Housewives” as the season’s highest-rated new show, averaging more than 17 million viewers–is something of a surprise, considering that its creators, J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, went against the current network beliefs about what audiences want.
Lindelof ticks off the TV truisms:
“People prefer franchise dramas like `CSI’ or `Law & Order,’ shows where the audience knows what they’ll get, shows that they don’t have to watch every week. What they don’t want are serialized stories, character-based shows, or horror elements.”
“Lost,” of course, embraces all those taboos.
Casting Fox in the lead entailed a considerable twist of fate. He came in to audition for the role of the conniving Sawyer, a part that eventually went to Josh Holloway.
The script was the most closely guarded document of last year’s pilot season. Auditioning actors were given only three- or four-page excerpts to work with. Until Fox showed up.
Abrams immediately saw him as Jack “and asked if I had time to read the script,” Fox says. “He put me in this office, but he’s so passionate, he kept running in every 20 minutes asking, `Do you like it? Do you like it?’ “
Originally, Jack didn’t make it through the first episode. But an executive at Touchstone Television convinced Abrams and Lindelof that killing him off would be too wrenching for the audience. Fox read the revised script in which Jack survived.
“He came back in and just killed it,” Lindelof says. “I really believed he had just been in a plane crash. There was no other guy considered for Jack from that moment on.”
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and alBerto Trevino ([email protected])