Life After Lost - EW Magazine Cover Story

Highlights from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY’s March 18, 2011 issue (on newsstands nationwide Friday, March 11):

LIFE AFTER LOST

The castaways and creators of Lost flash back to their time on the Island
and fill us in on what they’re up to now.

NEW YORK – Over six seasons, ABC’s intricate series about a group of inextricably linked plane-crash survivors redefined the outer limits of a broadcast network drama. And when it was ultimately time to “let go”—as Lost’s finale instructed us to—we packed up our overstuffed albums of Lost memories and headed off in search of the next great TV drama that might taunt and tantalize our minds. This week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly looks back at the people who inhabited these characters. When their exotic journey ended, how did they readjust to life off the Island and back in Hollywood? How do they look back on the series? And what are they up to now? EW asked the show’s cast and producers to flash back to their experiences on the show, and to tell us all about life after Lost.

Matthew Fox (Dr. Jack Shephard) delivered an emotionally potent performance as a broken hero striving for redemption in the series finale. “Redemption is always a big theme for me, so I had waited a long, long time for that moment for Jack,” Fox says. “He had made so many mistakes and fallen apart and become this shell of a man and was really lost. And to finally get to play that end where he knows—he has the singular clarity of what he’s meant to do and what the sacrifice will be—that felt good.” Fox is currently in London performing in Neil LaBute’s play, In a Forest Dark and Deep. “A play in the West End of London is something I’ve always dreamed of doing,” says Fox. “I’d like to take on that kind of challenge. And the theater I’ve done has been phenomenally rewarding, so it’s been my goal after Lost to get into a situation where I’m doing a film here and there and a play here and there—that broad of a structure.”

Jorge Garcia (Hugo “Hurley” Reyes) can’t avoid conservations about the famous series finale. “I still get people who say that they love the show and didn’t like the ending, and they’ll ask me what I thought of the ending. I love the ending. For one thing, I end up with the Island. How can I not like that ending?” Since Lost, Garcia has appeared everywhere from the cover of Weezer’s Hurley album to How I Met Your Mother to Mr. Sunshine to Fringe. “I was leaving Lost, prepared to wait a while for people to forget me in this one part before I might get a chance to find something else that was exciting to do,” he shares. “[But] everything just kept popping up.” Indeed, Garcia is ready to settle down, signing on to star in another J.J. Abrams drama about people from another unusual island, the Fox pilot Alcatraz.

Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet Burke) continues to get fan feedback. “There’s a whole bunch of people watching it on Netflix or DVD that say, ‘Oh my God, I just saw you for the first time last night!’ It keeps coming in waves, which is fun…. I was just on an airplane and the guy behind me was like, ‘I’m not trying to make your life difficult, but I loved Juliet.’ Why is that making my life difficult? What a wonderful thing to say!” Since leaving the show after season 5 (but appearing in two episodes during the final season), Mitchell went on to star as FBI agent Erica Evans on ABC’s reimagining of ’80s alien invasion miniseries V. “I always thought it would be really fun to be the lead protagonist in a sci-fi show—I’m a dork,” she laughs. “I thought, ‘If you get a chance to do what you dreamed of doing when you were a kid, you should probably do it once. You should kick ass if given the opportunity. Fight some aliens.’ ”

Josh Holloway (James “Sawyer” Ford) looks back at the pivotal moments in his life that surround Lost. “God, it was just magical. That’s where I got my first home, got married, had my first child. The things that happened there in Hawaii were phenomenal. I have no regrets…. However, [last summer] I’m looking around going, ‘Damn, I wish I had a job to go to.’ I was a little bit—forgive the pun, I’m gonna finally be able to use that word lost again one day—but I felt a little lost. I’m like, ‘Oooh, this is tough to hang back and play chess now.’” Holloway recently shot a supporting role opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol. “No one recognized me,” he chuckles. “I shaved my beard, cut off my hair, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, the Clark Kent disguise actually works! Change your hair, put some glasses on, and people don’t know who you are!’ It was refreshing not to just be Sawyer all the time.” Holloway will also trade punches for punchlines when he guest stars in the paintball-themed season finale of NBC’s Community.

The Men Behind the Curtain- Lost’s Executive Producers

Does Damon Lindelof still get Lost in his head? “I expected that I would stop thinking about it as much, but I still think about it all the time—in a very healthy way,” he says. “Since we wrote the finale, I have not had a single Lost thought, like, ‘Hey, I just had an idea for a cool story or flashback!’ ” Lindelof is now penning the Ridley Scott sci-fi drama Prometheus and co-writing and producing Star Trek 2. Carlton Cuse has closure. “I don’t miss the show. I feel like we got to tell the entire story of the show, and now life goes on.” Cuse has teamed up with Randall Wallace to develop a Civil War-set adventure series for ABC. “This is a fictional story about a family through [which] we examine all the issues of the Civil War…. We don’t have any unicorns or spaceships, but we’ve got everything else.” J.J. Abrams won an Emmy for directing Lost’s classic pilot, and then left the show in the hands of Lindelof and Cuse during season 1 to helm Mission: Impossible III. “When I look back at what the writers, cast, and crew did to build the amazing story that Damon and I started, it makes me proud,” says Abrams, who is finishing up his next directorial effort, Super 8; producing the next Mission: Impossible; developing Star Trek 2; and working on two TV pilots. It’s no coincidence that many of these projects star Losties: “I have a real love for those actors. We went through a meaningful experience together. It’s great to keep working with them on other things or see them flourish in other projects.”

For more on your favorite castaways, check out the full story on newsstands March 11th and at EW.com: http://popwatch.ew.com/2011/03/10/life-after-lost-fox-holloway/

(Cover Story, Page 34)

Source: EW