Thanks to Mike for the following interview which contains very mild spoilers at the end of the article.
Michael Emerson first appeared on Lost late in Season 2. A veteran of New York theater, an Emmy winner for a guest starring role on The Practice, and known to horror fans for his role in the first Saw, Emerson was initially signed to only appear in a handful of Lost episodes. But very quickly Emerson's performance as the character Benjamin Linus – don't let that Henry Gale alias fool you – proved to be incredibly dynamic and engrossing, making him someone the audience was immediately intrigued by. As a result, Emerson found himself elevated to a lead role in Season 3, with Ben quickly becoming central to much of the action and back story on the series.
I spoke to Emerson early in November, as he was in Hawaii, in the midst of filming the seventh episode of Lost's upcoming fourth season. When we spoke the writers' strike had not begun but was imminent – in fact, it began mere days later. As Emerson speculated to me at the time would likely be the case, we have since learned that Lost was able to complete eight of the sixteen episodes they had planned for Season 4 before the strike caused them to cease production for the time being.
During our conversation, Emerson and I spoke about his role as Ben, fan reaction to the character and what's to come in Season 4.
Michael Emerson: I thought the announcement of an ending was a bold stroke and kind of a stroke of genius. It was a great sort of statement of confidence and purpose on the part of the writers, saying "We're not just pulling everyone's chain with this show. We know where we're going and we can wrap it up in this many episodes." It sort of throws down the gauntlet and it does sort of up the stakes for these next, precious, 48 episodes, which is all the more they'll ever do. It's a big, wide ranging story, with a lot of subplots to wrap up in that amount of time. So they'll have to do some fancy dancing to pull it all together. I think that's wonderful.
It does change, in some sense, the sort of business formula of the show. Now we do fewer episodes and certainly have a shorter work year. I think most people are at peace with that I think. One of the hardships of the show is to be away from home for nine months and now that it's only going to be seven months, that's a break, for me. It means a chance for me to go back east and possibly have a chance to do theater in the summer; that kind of thing. But it does upset the pay scale models and stuff like that.
IGN TV: On cable we're used to seasons that run 13 episodes or so, but it's so unusual for a major network series to plan these shorter seasons.
Emerson: It is, but maybe we're in that transitional period. Maybe the cable networks have got it figured out, which is that their casts are maybe happier and maybe their shows are stronger when there isn't such tremendous pressure to make so very much of it.
IGN TV: It's been said that with a shorter season like that you cut away the temptation to have much in the way of filler episodes.
Emerson: I think so. Obviously they're going to stick to some of their tried and true formula. We're going to continue to do flashbacks that are focused on particular characters and stuff like that. But I think the complication factor and the urgency factor will be up. Plus, we have this whole new deal where now we flash to the future as well, which is such a stroke of genius. I just think it's so great.
IGN TV: What did you think when you read the reveal to the flash-forward in the script?
Emerson: Well, it wasn't in my script! It was left out of everybody's script except Matt [Fox] and Evangeline [Lily]. So I didn't know what they were doing until it was broadcast. I didn't see those scenes and had no idea. And at first, I suppose like everybody else, I was a little bit confused. I thought "Jack with beard… what kind of flashback is this? When did he ever let his beard grow?" And then when it dawned on me that this wasn't in the past, this was in the future and that some survived, but not happily… And that their post island life is every bit as fraught and filled with regret and misjudgment as their life on the island… I just thought "Oh, that's really grown up."
IGN TV: Some fans think Ben is a likely candidate for whose funeral Jack attended.
Emerson: Wow. I don't know about that… That seems… hmm… I don't know. Unless there's some big changes in the course of the character between now and then, I can't imagine that anyone would visit [his funeral].
IGN TV: The theory is that if your character was right that Jack shouldn't have gotten on that phone with the people on the boat and that leaving the island was a bad idea, that maybe Jack would go to his funeral out of… well I don't know if respect is the right word.
Emerson: Ahh, right. I think Ben is dead right about that. I think we can trust Ben on that one; that the people on the boat mean them no good.
IGN TV: There have been several new cast announcements for Season 4.
Emerson: Right. Lots of new characters.
IGN TV: You were the new guy the year before, so how is it now welcoming the new crew?
Emerson: Well, you try to make them feel at home. They all look a little shell shocked, because there's no orientation period like at a resort or anything. You just sort of fly in one day and the following morning you're in the jungle somewhere, running around. So it's kind of disorienting when you first get here. I remember what it's like to be staying at the hotel and picked up by the van every morning, so I try to get together with people or show them around town a little bit and make their lives easier. But these new characters are really intriguing and some of them are quite dangerous. It's going to be interesting.
IGN TV: When last we saw your character it was notable to finally have him in the midst of almost all the other regulars on the series. Was it fun to finally be among that whole crew?
Emerson: It is. I'm going to work with some of the people that I never got to work with before.
IGN TV: I was thinking about that. Like I couldn't remember you ever having a scene with Claire or Jin…
Emerson: No, no. Or Rose or any of those characters. Also, it throws my character out of doors, which I'm not used to. The first part of this season we were filming a lot in the jungle, tramping around in rain and heat and blood and violence. It's been so violent so far, the first part of the season, I can't tell you…
IGN TV: Wow, even more so than the beginning of last season when you were holding Jack, Kate and Sawyer prisoner?
Emerson: I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I think this is as violent as we've gotten. [Laughs] For awhile there, it just seemed like it was all guns and beatings. Very intense.
IGN TV: Have you gotten to have any notable interaction with different characters than you have before?
Emerson: I have been with them, but I haven't had that many great scenes with new people. I continue to do the bulk of my scene work with John Locke, with the character Juliet and with Jack. Those are sort of my mainstays.
IGN TV: You and Locke had a pretty fascinating dynamic last season. How is it working with Terry O'Quinn?
Emerson: I love working with him. We make a good team, you know? We're like a double act. It's like we've been on vaudeville forever and we know each others signs and signals and rhythms and stuff. We tend to move at a fairly high rate of speed through our material and it usually works out smoothly and well. I was so delighted when he got the Emmy, because I think it was so very much deserved. And I also felt like we shared in that honor, because we're so joined at the hip on the show. So many of our scenes are really great scenes and that's sort of central to the themes of the show as well. I really love working with him.
IGN TV: It must have been very gratifying to get that Emmy nomination yourself too, in your first season as a regular.
Emerson: Oh yeah. It was fantastic. What an honor. That was enough, right there.
IGN TV: People were very quickly fascinated by your character. Were you surprised by that strong initial response?
Emerson: I guess you never expect that. So much of the TV work you do is just sort of a paycheck and then you go home and it doesn't really get talked about much except by friends and family. So of course I didn't know when I first came out here that my character would have such staying power and that he would end up being so much talked about was surprising. I'm still sort of adjusting to that.
IGN TV: In your first few episodes you were a prisoner, and speaking of violence on the show, you were actually beat up quite a bit.
Emerson: Yeah, Sayid worked him over pretty good there!
IGN TV: I imagine it was interesting as an actor to play a guy getting so physically beaten down who still somehow seems in control.
Emerson: It was. It was interesting. In fact, sometimes you think, wow, he takes so much punishment so coolly that there's something a little unnatural about it. Like he has some sort of supernatural taste for punishment or an ability to withstand it – that somehow he's at his best when he's in pain. I don't know, it's sort of a mystery to me, but it's interesting.
IGN TV: The show has rode a line a bit on whether it would actually go into direct supernatural or fantasy elements or not, but the reveal of Jacob seemed to push it a bit further into that area.
Emerson: That scene floored me. I thought "Oh man, we have gone into a new realm here." I mean that's like a horror movie scene, that one. It was great.
IGN TV: That was also your first big flashback episode.
Emerson: Yeah, that's right. That's been the one and only Ben flashback.
IGN TV: What was it like playing your character younger and in a different place than we've come to know him?
Emerson: I was surprised by how dark the episode was and I was surprised by the dire deeds that were given to Ben.
IGN TV: Yeah, you kill your own dad!
Emerson: It was intense, right?
IGN TV: Oh yeah.
Emerson: When we originally shot it, I had been more of a passive player in that mass murder. Then they re-shot it to put an actual poison canister in Ben's hand so that he's not just sort of waiting there while gas floats by the van to kill his father - He actually opens a canister in the van. And that was a scene that I didn't shoot, so I was surprised and shocked when I saw that, because that makes him even more culpable and even more the initiator of this crime.
IGN TV: Oh, so they did the additional filming without you?
Emerson: Yeah, they added that as an insert. I was worried, because all the time I'd been going along thinking he seems like the evil character, he seems like the villain, but ultimately he'll be revealed to be this great freedom fighter or the only guy that stands between doom and the planet Earth or something like that. But in that episode he seemed so bad that I was a little bit shaken. I thought "Jeez, maybe I've had this Pollyanna image. I really am a villain!" But I've talked to the writers about it and they said "No, no. Hang on. Your dream is not a bad dream. Hang on to that, because there's much story yet to tell." Some of these events will be revisited and re-contextualized.
IGN TV: Your character has insisted he's not the bad guy. It sounds like after that conversation with the producers, you're still able to think of him as someone working towards, what he sees at least, as a greater good?
Emerson: Oh yeah. I still think of it that way.
IGN TV: Any other hints you can give on Season 4?
Emerson: Well, there's a new threat and the threat comes from off island. So that's a whole new set of circumstances. There's a lot more moving around. People go more places in this season. And of course we have this sort of tri-level storytelling, which is really exciting and allows for a lot of amazing trickery and misdirection. There's all this business where we can be in the present, the past or the future, and the clever ways that can all be played with are going to be really exciting.
IGN TV: Do you do much speculation on what's to come for your character or basically just take it script to script?
Emerson: I do sort of take it script to script. As far as me playing the part, I sort of just deal with the scene at hand and luckily my instinct that he's an ambiguous character and gives up as little as possible seems to serve well in that case. And I'm just as glad actually not to be having to ponder big story arcs and stuff like that because in a way it's freeing for me to not even have to worry about that stuff and just to show up and play the moment.
IGN TV: When it becomes to a particularly big reveal for your character are you ever given any advance warning beyond when you receive the script?
Emerson: I have had that. Generally, we're just sort of improvising. But there was a time when Ben was supposed to have back surgery, someone did talk to me a few weeks in advance and say "This thing is coming down the pike. We don't know what the exact shape of it will be, but you might want to start to lay the sort of plausible groundwork for this health problem." But even knowing that as I did, there wasn't a whole lot to do about it. There's no way to insert sudden sharp back pains into the stories as you're going along, so it just comes up when it comes up in the writing. But yeah, every once in awhile someone will help you try to prepare for something.
IGN TV: The last few years have seen a lot of escalation in your career, going back to winning the Emmy for The Practice.
Emerson: I think my work on Lost comes out of that work on The Practice. I think someone saw that and that helped me to get this part.
Source: IGN
Thanks to Mike for the following interview which contains very mild spoilers at the end of the article.
Michael Emerson first appeared on Lost late in Season 2. A veteran of New York theater, an Emmy winner for a guest starring role on The Practice, and known to horror fans for his role in the first Saw, Emerson was initially signed to only appear in a handful of Lost episodes. But very quickly Emerson's performance as the character Benjamin Linus – don't let that Henry Gale alias fool you – proved to be incredibly dynamic and engrossing, making him someone the audience was immediately intrigued by. As a result, Emerson found himself elevated to a lead role in Season 3, with Ben quickly becoming central to much of the action and back story on the series.
I spoke to Emerson early in November, as he was in Hawaii, in the midst of filming the seventh episode of Lost's upcoming fourth season. When we spoke the writers' strike had not begun but was imminent – in fact, it began mere days later. As Emerson speculated to me at the time would likely be the case, we have since learned that Lost was able to complete eight of the sixteen episodes they had planned for Season 4 before the strike caused them to cease production for the time being.
During our conversation, Emerson and I spoke about his role as Ben, fan reaction to the character and what's to come in Season 4.
Source: IGN
