Time to get Lost

Matthew Fox finds he’s ready for a break from his hectic TV and film career

LOS ANGELES — Somebody book Matthew Fox an Oceanic Airlines flight. After multiple movies and four seasons of Lost, the 41-year-old actor sounds ready to drop off the radar.

Exhaustion? Well, there is that — on this day, he’s admittedly “dragging,” having just flown in from Hawaii where he’s shooting his hit drama about stranded plane crash survivors. But there’s also self-preservation and the dangers of overexposure to consider.

“I think I’ve been in a lot of things and I’m really high in people’s consciousness right now,” he says during a sit-down with Sun Media. “With the success of (this year’s thriller) Vantage Point, I have the opportunity to put things in development right now so I can prepare for next year’s hiatus. But I’ll be taking a break this summer to let things settle.”

SPEED RACER

Specifically, he’s referring to the box-office dust that’ll be kicked up by the May 9 release of Speed Racer, the effects-heavy extravaganza in which Fox stars as the mysterious, masked Racer X. Directed by the Wachowski Brothers of The Matrix fame, the movie is the reason Fox, looking more than a little bleary-eyed, has come in from the Lost set to speak to journalists at the Long Beach Speedway. Then it’s back to Hawaii to wrap up the six post-writers strike episodes that will round out this truncated season. The first of those airs tomorrow on CTV and ABC, capping off a resurgent year for the series, which had been criticized for lagging. That’s all changed, though, since the creators and network agreed to end the series in 2010, says Fox. “Things have started to frickin’ fly, because I think if anything (co-creator Damon Lindelof) went, ‘Holy s–t, I’ve got a lot of story to try to tell in 48 episodes’. So that’s been satisfying to the audience.”

And a relief, he admits.

“I was really happy. I’m fond of the story and proud to be part of it. I’m very fortunate to have such an amazing character — he’s very complex. I get to do a lot of different things on Lost. But I also didn’t want to spend 10 years doing it and have the show die a slow, miserable death. It has a beginning, a middle and end; it’s not a set-up to lead into another case.”

After Lost, however, he nixes the idea of returning to TV. “It’s not like I’ve suddenly been making movies and I’m a snobby film actor now. I believe some of the best writing is going on in television. It’s an incredible place for innovation because they can take chances. But I can’t deal with six to nine months wrapped up in one character anymore.”

Interestingly, Fox — who has an 11-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son with his wife, Margherita Ronchi — grew up on a ranch in Wyoming where he wasn’t allowed to watch television. So how does someone who couldn’t have told Gilligan’s Island from Fantasy Island decide to become an actor?

DEGREE

“I’m still trying to figure that out, man, I really am,” says Fox, who, after graduating from Columbia University with an economics degree, walked away from Wall Street to pursue acting. “It is interesting and there is some irony in that my father was not fond of the idea of television and we weren’t allowed to watch any of it. But he wasn’t so much anti-television as he was pro-books and really encouraged the idea of using fiction as a way to develop your imagination.”

Not surprisingly, he has no regrets about his career choice, although he’s still leery of the celebrity that accompanies it.

“I know it’s really hard for a lot of people to believe because a lot of people are smitten by the idea of what it must be like to be famous, but I really, honestly — because I deeply analyze it a lot — would love it if I could be part of these type of stories and work with these type of directors and not have to deal with the other element of it.”

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