Toronto Sun (2006)

Fox immersed himself in role of grief-stricken coach

NEW YORK — Matthew Fox, star of TV’s Lost and former star of Party Of Five, grew up in a household of artists where television was not allowed.

“Ironic,” understates Fox.

The actor, 40, makes a rare appearance on the big screen this week in We Are Marshall, a film about the aftermath of a tragedy at Marshall University in 1970. The entire football team was killed in a plane crash, an event that devastated the town of Huntington, W. Va. Fox plays Red Dawson, who was assistant coach of the team. At the last minute, Dawson changed his plans and did not board the ill-fated flight. As Fox puts it, “Red has been carrying the weight of that night with him for 36 years and thinking about the fact that he wasn’t on that plane.”

We Are Marshall is an account of how the survivors learn to rebuild and regroup. It’s a heartbreaker.

“It was tough,” Fox says. “The real Red Dawson and I have become friends, and I felt a real responsibility to tell his story as best I could. When we first met and started talking, he said to me, ‘Well, you’re going to have to learn how to cry.’

Fox lives in Hawaii with his wife and two children, and not merely because his wildly popular TV show, Lost, is filmed there.

“My family is happy there, and I have two young kids aged 9 and 5, and it’s a great place for them to grow up. I like it because they get to spend a lot of time outdoors. We live near the beach, and they can run around. There’s a sense of freedom there you don’t get in a big city.”

And, says Fox, having spent his own childhood in Wyoming, he knows the benefits of what he calls “growing up outside.”

His family had a spread in Crowheart, Wyo., but his father and mother are both painters and his older brother is also an artist and a university art professor. “Our parents wouldn’t allow television in our house when I was growing up, and so my grandfather actually gave us one, which pissed off my father. At our house, it was always about reading. They were big proponents of reading.”

And his own children?

“We didn’t have a TV until we went to Hawaii, and we rented a place and the TV was already hooked up. So for the past few years, they can watch a bit of TV.” He looks a tad sheepish.

Fox himself had finished a degree in economics at Columbia before he ever gave acting a try. As he tells it, the acting thing was a bit of an escape route, “because I knew I didn’t really want to work on Wall Street. I figured there was no rush. I’d study acting to find out what it was all about.”

It seems to have paid off. On his break from shooting Lost, Fox also starred in a film called Vantage Point, which was shot in Mexico City. He chooses his scripts, he says, based solely on whether or not he wants to be part of the story.

“If that means I walk in and deliver a suitcase, so be it.”

He is not concerned about being the star.

‘FEEL i HAVE NO CHOICE’

“For me, it’s always just, I read scripts and suddenly feel I have no choice but to do this project, even if I’m scared sh–less. You have anxiety as you try to find your way into a project, at least I do, but there are certain things you come across that just seem inevitable. No matter how hard you try to talk yourself out of it, you know you’re going to be a part of it.”

Being part of Lost is something he really loves, and he particularly appreciates the show’s afterlife — all the talk and the theorizing and the speculation among viewers about what might happen next. That’s a tribute to the show, he says.

Er, anything he’d like to reveal about Lost?

“I could tell you exactly how it’s going to end,” he says, with a wicked smile. “But I’m not going to.”