Globe and Mail (2006)

The Lost star (and former college player) knows his football, writes GAYLE MacDONALD. So when he was offered a role in the gridiron drama We Are Marshall, he suited up

Matthew Fox, the lanky actor best known to his fans as the earnest medical man in ABC’s hit show Lost, knows his way around a football field.

He played throughout high school and later in college at Columbia, and can rhyme off quite an impressive laundry list of injuries. “I broke my leg in a couple of places in high school,” recalls the 40-year-old actor, who is sporting an Eagles T-shirt (as in his favourite NFL team).

“In college I had a couple of concussions, and various ankle and wrist injuries,” he adds.

But the thumping didn’t dissuade him. “Injuries are a part of football,” shrugs Fox, in Toronto recently to promote the film We Are Marshall (in theatres Friday), based on the 1970 tragedy that wiped out the entire Marshall University football squad.

“There is so much to be learned from the game. It really is an amazing sport in terms of how much it can teach you about life, about co-operation with others, about discipline and about perseverance.”

Given his passion for the game, Fox says he agreed to take on the role of Marshall University’s real-life assistant football coach Red Dawson as soon as his agent handed him the script. The movie co-stars another Matthew — McConaughey — as head coach Jack Lengyel, who was recruited in 1971 to rebuild the team.

Shot in the university’s hometown of Huntington, W.Va., We Are Marshall (the fans’ battle cry) starts as the team boards the plane that will crash in the Appalachian Mountains less than one minute before it’s due to land at the Tri-State Airport.

Fox’s character narrowly missed being on the plane, changing places at the last minute with another coach who was driving back.

After the crash on the evening of Nov. 14, the townspeople — each of whom knew someone who died on that plane — grapple with grief and agonize over whether they should shelve the football program or try to resurrect it.

The tragedy, one of the worst in the history of sport, claimed 37 players, eight coaches and university staff, the flight crew and 25 prominent Huntington citizens who had travelled with the team to an away game in North Carolina.

“Red has been carrying the weight of that night with him for 36 years and thinking about the fact that he wasn’t on the plane,” says Fox, who got to know Dawson on set, where he was hired as an adviser. “Making this movie has brought up things I believe Red has tried to keep inside.”

As soon as Lost went on summer hiatus, Fox shed his Dr. Jack Shepherd persona and hopped a plane to Huntington, where the crew filmed for one month before moving to Atlanta to wrap the final two months of shooting.

Initially, Fox says there was “probably a bit of trepidation [from the townspeople] when they found out some big Hollywood studio was going to make a feature film about something that is so personal and held so closely to them.

“But the way [director] McG and Warner Bros. approached the town, and when we started shooting there, I think people realized our hearts were in the right spot. We had amazing support.”

In the film, Fox plays the taciturn, suffering straight man, while McConaughey is the more mad-cap, indefatigable optimist. Before this film, the two Matthews had never met.

“We had an interesting dynamic to figure out there,” says Fox. “The real Red Dawson and Jack Lengyel in 1970 didn’t necessarily see eye to eye. But they’re two sides of the same coin.

“When we are dealt some massive amount of grief, there are usually two arguments: Do you move past the grief and let it go? Or do you hold onto it, as a sort of burden of the remembrance of the people that are gone?

“That’s what these two characters represent in the film. But ultimately they have the same goal: to put this program back on its feet and help heal the community.”

Fox was born in Abington, Pa., outside Philadelphia, but grew up on a family ranch in Wyoming where his parents raised longhorn cattle and horses. He graduated from Columbia with a degree in economics and planned to work on Wall Street.

But a former girlfriend’s mother told him he should go into modelling. That led to a couple of TV commercials. He had the acting bug, and a leading role on the mid-nineties TV show Party of Five finally got Fox noticed. Lost has earned him an Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.

He now lives with his wife, Margherita Ronchi, and their two young children (daughter Kyle who is 9, and Byron who is 5) in Oahu, Hawaii, the setting for Lost.

Fox says he hoped Lost would become be a breakout sensation.

“I would have been really shocked if people didn’t really love it, but at the same time I never expect anything. It’s just a mystery why people get on board certain things and why they don’t get on others.”

He says he loves his TV show, the cast and crew. Making movies is another challenge that he’s happy to take on, but only if the script is right.

“If the right thing comes along again — like We Are Marshall — I do it because I feel I really have no choice.”

But Fox adds, with two young kids, it’s never an easy decision.

“Time with my family is very precious to me. The kids are at ages right now where they seem to change every day. So I just want to be around them. I have to feel really compelled by something to pack up and leave Hawaii.”