St. Louis Post-Dispatch (2006)

Plane-crash coincidence is ‘Lost’ on Matthew Fox

Matthew Fox completely missed the ironic connection between his television hit “Lost” and his big-screen appearance in “We Are Marshall,” he admits with a shrug.

The pilot for the series began with a horrific plane crash that was strictly fictional. “We Are Marshall” opens with the real-life crash in which most of the Marshall University football team, most of its coaches and prominent boosters, were killed in 1970.

“I might be the only one that didn’t notice,” Fox says. “Right after I committed to ‘We Are Marshall,’ Jorge Garcia, who plays Hurley on ‘Lost,’ sent me an e-mail saying, ‘You can’t seem to escape plane crashes.’

“The two stories are very different, but there is that weird link.”

In the film, which opened Dec. 22, Fox plays assistant coach Red Dawson, who gave up his seat on the ill-fated flight at the last minute.

“He suffered from survivor’s guilt, which is not a rational thing,” Fox says. “He sort of closed himself off. He felt responsible for not being on that plane and had all-consuming feelings of shame and guilt. Red has these moments where it just sneaks up on him — something will just trigger a memory, and he gets caught off guard by how emotional he gets. He doesn’t want to show that, and he kind of fights it down.”

“We Are Marshall” marks Fox’s first serious venture into film since making his mark on television with “Party of Five” (1994-2000) and then becoming a hot Hollywood property as the dashing hero Jack Shephard on “Lost.”

In part, this reflects the demands of series television: He was determined to meet Dawson before filming began but was tied up in Hawaii, where “Lost” is filmed.

“We finally decided to ask Red to come to Honolulu from Huntington, W.Va.,” Fox remembers. “It was a huge trip for him, I don’t think he’d ever flown that far. He had some doubts, but we just bonded from the moment we met. He came to our house, and my wife cooked her special lasagna for him and he loved it. I immediately liked him. I immediately felt that I understood him on some level.

“It was hard when we started talking about the tragedy. Red has carried that burden for so long. But I think it was a cathartic experience for him.”

As the town of Huntington fought to recover from the devastating loss, many favored canceling the football program. Supporters who rallied to save it recruited a coach from Ohio named Jack Lengyel, played in the movie by Matthew McConaughey, to build a new team. One of his first moves was to convince Red Dawson to be his assistant coach.

“The challenge for Matthew and I was to understand the tension between our characters,” Fox says. “It’s that fundamental dilemma of how you handle grief. Do you let it go and move forward, or do you hold on to it, keeping the memory of what was lost alive? I think anybody that loses somebody in their life can have that argument with you. And that’s what those two guys were working out. Eventually, I think their relationship had sort of a Butch and Sundance Kid quality.”

Fox drew on his own experience as a wide receiver at Columbia University to make the coaching scenes authentic.

“I first played as a sophomore,” he recalls, shaking his head. “We were a couple years younger than the guys we were going up against, and we proceeded to get our butts handed to us there for a little while before we started winning games in my senior year.

“Besides the mechanics of the game, you learn so much about life. I still use things like going through a losing streak and having to believe in yourself in the face of really intense adversity. Still, to this day, my closest friends are people that I played with.”

While the film’s football scenes are compelling, as the new Marshall team struggles to win a game, Fox insists that the film, directed by McG, is about something more universal than sports.

“It happens to be the true story about the Marshall University football team,” he says. “But it could have been 75 people that died in a plane crash coming out of this small community that had nothing to do with football. It’s a story about healing and about the strength of the human spirit.”

Fox is clearly proud of this project and eager to do more work on the big screen, but he’s quick to dispel rumors that Jack might be the next survivor on “Lost” to face an untimely end.

“I’ve been off for a few weeks,” he says. “They didn’t need Jack Shephard for a few episodes, but I can’t tell you why.”

Speaking of things he can’t tell you, like all cast members of “Lost,” Fox has been plagued by fans imploring him to let them in on some of the show’s secrets.

“I’m one of those people that, when I’m reading a really good book, I certainly would never spoil it for myself by turning to the end,” the actor says, laughing.

“I sometimes fake people out when they come up to me and go, ‘I want to know what’s going on, tell me this or tell me that.’ I’ll look them in the eye and say, ‘You ready? I’m going to tell you.’ And then they’ll go, ‘No! No, no, don’t tell me!’ I kind of call their bluff.

“The truth is, most of them don’t really want to know.”

One of the biggest challenges he faced in making “We Are Marshall,” Fox says, was to deliver a film that Red Dawson would be proud of.

“Red made me promise him that he would get an opportunity to see the movie as many times as he wanted by himself,” the actor recalls.

“He does not like to cry in front of people. He does not like to show emotions in front of people. So we set up screenings in Huntington. Finally Red called and said that he was blown away.

“It was hard for him to express what he thought, but I know he’s really happy about how it came out.

“And that means everything to me.”