Matthew Fox Interview

Thanks to Eboni for the heads up.

As he prepares to make his West End debut, the Lost star on why he is more comfortable flying his plane, sitting on a horse or herding cattle than walking up a red carpet

'My hangar is my getaway place. Some guys have a garden shed where they can disappear. This is my sanctuary where I can get away from the world, where it's just me, my car and my plane,' said Matthew Fox

When they can get away with it, some celebrities like to be interviewed in five-star hotel suites. It’s safer for them; they’re never far from their agent and preferred brand of bottled water. Matthew Fox, the star of baffling yet reverentially followed TV saga Lost, invites me instead to the top of a 9,000ft volcanic cone with a spectacular view of the surrounding mountains.

Fox is something of an iconoclast. Mount Bachelor, in Bend, Oregon, is his home patch. Geography is not the only thing that distances him from LA. He might not be the only star who dislikes Hollywood’s latest fixations; he is, though, one of the few who will actually say it.

‘Look at 3D,’ he says. ‘That’s a major setback to good storytelling. I took my little boy to see The Last Airbender. It was an awful film. The director M Night Shyalaman hasn’t directed a decent movie since The Sixth Sense.

‘I’m disillusioned with the drift towards gratuitous entertainment, which so much of Hollywood is now. Because of the state of the economy people seem to want pure escapism. But if the roles I fight to get all go to Matt Damon, then I won’t work. I turn a lot of stuff down – big, big movies, the kind I wouldn’t want to go to the cinema to see.

'I’m sorry, but I can’t make a movie with the blonde from ER who is starring in every single bad romantic comedy. Unless they reinvent the wheel in terms of romantic comedies – in other words, they start making them funny and romantic again – I’m not going to be starring in any of those movies.’

'I'm far more comfortable sitting on a horse and herding cattle than walking up a red carpet'

I sensed this might be the measure of Fox during my journey here. Not to the top of the cone – that was easy: a drive up the mountain by way of scenic detour, en route to the vast aircraft hangar where Fox keeps his plane. The hard part was getting to Bend, a tiny city tucked into the eastern foothills of the Cascade Mountains in Central Oregon.

It’s difficult to imagine a more remote spot to settle in, and snow has made the journey even more difficult. A nine-hour flight to Seattle is followed by a ten-hour wait for a connection; only to find, in my case, that at 1am all flights are cancelled, meaning I will miss my 10am meeting with him.

Fortunately a couple of locals at the airport sense my panic; they are also huge fans of Lost. So they drive me and Live’s photo crew seven hours through the night in their hire car, arriving at the hotel just minutes before Fox is due to pick me up.
The plan is that Fox will take me up for a spin in his own Bonanza G36 plane but weather conditions dictate otherwise.
‘If we attempt to fly in this snow we’ll almost certainly crash. It would make for an interesting headline, but this isn’t the day I’m planning to die.’
Instead we head towards his hangar where we’ll drool for a while over his plane before he treats me to lunch at his favourite local diner.
‘My hangar is my getaway place,’ he says. ‘Some guys have a garden shed where they can disappear. This is my sanctuary where I can get away from the world, where it’s just me, my car and my plane.’
The 44-year-old likes to be taken out of his comfort zone.

Source: Full Article @ dailymail