Daily Record (April 2006)STILL LOST; As hit island drama Lost returns to our screens, heart-throb Matthew Fox reveals it’s his kids who’re losing out. THE wait is over for fans of Lost - the second series of the surreal island drama crashes back onto our screens on Tuesday night. But will we finally get the answers to the questions posed in the first series… Exactly where are the plane crash survivors marooned? What is the mysterious creature chasing them around the jungle? Who can they hear whispering in the trees? One thing is certain though, Dr Jack is back as leader of the island, fighting good fight with decency and courage to keep his friends alive - even if he makes a few mistakes along the way. Away from the fictional island Matthew Fox, the actor who plays the dishy doc, also has high standards. And, like Jack, he admits to failing sometimes. American Matthew uprooted his family - Italian wife Margherita Ronchi and their daughter Kyle, seven, and three-year-old son Byron - to live in Hawaii where the series is filmed. However, he has been so busy working for the past year that he has struggled to spend time with them. And the actor says the show is making him feel like he’s failing as a dad. Fresh from filming the second series - which begins with a special double bill from 10pm on Channel 4 - he said: “The ultimate responsibility is being a father. “I think that everybody who has children but also is ambitious and has a career is always juggling their roles. “You’re constantly weighing back and forth about where you are putting your energy. “I have very high standards for myself as a father. But do I spend as much time with my children in that role? “Right now, over the last year-and-a-half I think not to my standard, no, because I have been very, very busy. “That is something I am constantly conscious of. I wake up every day trying to figure out a way to negotiate all of this. “Time management has been a big thing for me over the past year, trying to eliminate time consuming things from my life that I don’t feel I can afford anymore and putting all that time into the things that are the most important to me.” In a case of life imitating art, that is one of the problems facing Matthew’s alter-ego Jack, who is seen as a knight in shining armour by the plane crash survivors - and female fans of the show. The second series opens with Jack in the thick of it as he tries to discover what the hatch is that he and Locke opened in the dying seconds of series one’s final episode. In another of the show’s famous twists, the survivors of the tail-end of the plane are also discovered, bringing more tensions into the camp as Jack’s leadership is constantly questioned. Matthew said: “Year two is really going to be about him trying to exercise his position of being leader and having people second-guessing that constantly. “Jack isn’t a knight in shining armour. We’re living in a modern world where our heroes need to be more complicated and more flawed and more complex than that.” Flashbacks in series one saw him ruining his dad’s surgical career by revealing he’d operated on a woman while under the influence of drink. Jack was also shown feeling driven to marry a girl whose life he’d saved. That past comes back to haunt him in the first episode of series two, entitled Man of Science, Man of Faith. He follows Kate and Locke down the hatch when they’re kidnapped and finds their captor is Desmond - played by Scots actor Henry Ian Cusick - bizarrely, a man he met on the night he operated on his wife. The new series also brings back Dominic Monaghan as Charlie, Josh Holloway as Sawyer, Maggie Grace as Shannon, Evangeline Lilly as Kate, Jorge Garica as Hurley and Terry O’Quinn as Locke. And there are new characters, including Michelle Rodriguez as Ann Lucia Cortez, the leader of the “tailies” - the survivors from the rear-end of the plane. Again, bizarrely, we met her in the first series - she had a drink with Jack before boarding doomed Flight 815 and they’d arranged to have another during the flight. Other new characters include Libby, played by Cynthia Watros and Mr Eko, played by British actor Adewale Akinnuoye Agbaje who holds the answers to some of the island’s biggest puzzles. SO, will Jack and Kate finally reveal their love for each other? Or will Sawyer’s attraction to Kate get in the way? Matthew said: “Jack definitely is drawn to her in a really intense way, but I think everybody knows that feeling of being drawn to somebody that they don’t necessarily want to be drawn to. “As this story progresses they will move closer to each other and then have setbacks, and that’s really fun to play. It’s interesting. It’s subtle and I really enjoy that stuff.” Matthew is the leader off screen as well, organising debut-show parties for the cast - and swimming in the nude. He said: “It began last year because we were transplanted to a new place, leaving friends and family behind. “I felt we needed to do some bonding and have a place to socialise together. “Hopefully the other cast members who have children will bring their children. It’s a family affair for the first couple of hours. “We’ll watch the show, talk about it afterwards, congratulate each other on being involved in something that’s very good. And as the night progresses they sometimes turn into a party-party when people get some cocktails in them. We have fun and relax. “Then we go skinny dipping. “All my life I’ve been pretty much an instigator, getting people to trust each other enough in a non-sexual way to take their clothes off at night and go swimming. It’s also a bonding experience.” But these parties are slowing as the cast get to know each other better - and as tight filming schedules leave them little free time. Looking tanned and fit in a white T-shirt and jeans, Matthew shows off his now famous tattoos, which he had done before Lost but which have now been incorporated into the show. He has a large red symbol on his inner left arm and on his left shoulder the number five in a sundial, surrounded by Chinese letters. Enjoying the sense of mystery, Matthew has never revealed what the tattoos mean. The Chinese letters are thought to read “eagle roams the endless sky” and the five is possibly a reference to Party Of Five. That was the Golden Globe-winning series from the Nineties in which he found fame playing Charlie Salinger, the eldest of five siblings who had to take over care of his family when their parents died. He added: “We don’t do anything with them. That’s exactly how they are on the show. I don’t ever tell any one what they mean tome. I’mreally excited to find out what they mean to Jack. “The co-creators Damon Lindel of and JJ Abrams could invent many reasons for Jack to have them.” Matthew has been living the last nine months in Hawaii where Lost is filmed. It’s a long way from where he grew up - on a ranch in Wyoming where his family raised longhorn cattle and horses and grew barley for Coors beer. He studied Economics at Columbia University and was heading for Wall Street until a girlfriend’s mother, who was a modelling agent, convinced him to try some modelling which led to television adverts and then acting. Life on Hawaii seems to be good for him. Although the hours on Lost are long we’ll see anew side to Jack this series - a lean side. He said: “When we first meet him on the island, because he’s coming from civilisation, I wanted him to be a little soft. “With the progression of the story you see him get more lean and lean and lean, because of circumstances and lack of carbohydrates.” As well as looking fitter and seeing Jack as a lot darker than in the first series, Matthew wants to keep the rest of Lost’s secrets to himself. He won’t comment on whether the show will descend into a war between the two factions of survivors from the front and the rear of the plane. And he doesn’t even want to think where the show is going - are they in limbo or in hell or some alien experiment? He laughed: “I don’t spend time thinking about “I know it’s going to be something that’s phenomenal and amazing and incredible and I’m just looking forward to getting there.” Lost, begins with two one-hour episodes on Tuesday on Ch4, from 10pm. LOST THE PLOT HERE are the most puzzling questions still to be answered: THE ISLAND SO where are they? There have been many theories. Some, dismissed by the creators, include that it is purgatory or a time warp, that they are being studied by aliens and also that the island is a reality TV show. So when we find out it had better be good. THE HATCH LOCKE found a metal door in the ground with no obvious way of being opened. Is it alien or man-made and where does it lead? Is the whole island made on a metal structure? The survivors blew it open at the end of the first series. THE MONSTER WE’VE seen plenty of shaking trees and horrified faces but we’ve not actually seen the monster which is supposed to be stalking the island. It’s killed the plane’s pilot and almost got Locke. We know it isn’t a dinosaur. THE OTHERS THEY whisper in the jungle and are supposed to be out to get the survivors. At the end of the first series they snatched Michael’s son, Walt. The Frenchwoman claims they kidnapped her daughter, Alex, and one of them tried to take a pregnant Claire. So who are they? What do they want with children? POLAR BEAR SAWYER killed a Polar Bear in the first series - but what on earth was it doing on a tropical island? THE NUMBERS THEY are on the hatch door - 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42. They are the same numbers Hurley got from a mental patient, who’d heard them from a naval officer who committed suicide. Hurley used them on the lottery and won $156 million but now he reckons bad luck follows him. The same numbers brought The Frenchwoman, Danielle, to the island. |
