A-List: Future Careers For Lost Stars
By Josh Spiegel
May 20, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
In some way, though, as much as I love Lost, and as much as the performers are almost uniformly excellent, it may be very hard for some of the bigger actors to find work that doesn’t require them to be typecast as characters similar to those they played on Lost. Typecasting happens all throughout Hollywood, but with five actors in particular, I’m sincerely hoping that the curse is avoided. Again, with only a few exceptions (I’m looking at you, overly earnest young actress who played Ben Linus’s daughter, Alex), the cast was great, but some are more deserving of future stardom than others, either because they’ve got a long future ahead of them, or because their performances on Lost were too great to be ignored. It’s almost time to say a final good-bye to this great show, so let’s take a look at five folks from the mysterious Island who should get big careers post-show, shall we?
Josh Holloway
This week in New York City, the broadcast networks announced their fall 2010 schedules to advertisers. Many pilots are ordered, but not all are picked up. One of the potentially unsuccessful pilots was from NBC, a remake of The Rockford Files starring Dermot Mulroney. Though NBC wants to retool the show, the actor that the people behind the program should have gotten already has a great performance under his belt, and that’s Josh Holloway. The ladies may love him for his willingness to not wear a shirt and be something close to the ultimate bad boy, but Holloway’s also an incredibly talented performer. In the early days, his character, James “Sawyer” Ford, was best known for his cruel, pop-culture-infused nicknames, referencing anything from Star Wars to Ghostbusters to John Steinbeck. The last two years have put his role in a new light.
Holloway, in the past two seasons of Lost, has brought a soulful take to the character, who started out Season 5 mourning the presumed loss of his closest friends, ended it in love with something else (and not just in lust, as he may have been with Kate Austen) and losing them. This year, Sawyer’s been in a brooding mode, but in the flash-sideways world, he’s a cop, partnering up with Miles Straume (who we’ll get to in a minute). These two are about the best cop duo since Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon; they could have their own show and it’d be great. Holloway would be a perfect Rockford; hunky, smart, roguish, charming, selfish, yet caring enough to not be a complete jerk. In essence, Holloway has brought the aura of Han Solo to the small screen. If not Rockford, I’m more than okay with watching him on the big screen. This guy, above all else, deserves to be a huge star. Fingers crossed.
Michael Emerson
Somewhere around the end of season two of Lost, a character made a simple request, and in doing so, became the most intriguing, evasive, shrewd, and terrifying villain on network television. All he wanted to know was if the castaways had some milk…or was that all he wanted to know? As Benjamin Linus, Michael Emerson (whose previously most well-known role was as a bug-eyed serial killer on The Practice) exuded mystery from the beginning. Ben, despite being presented in flashbacks as a good kid turned terrible guy who committed mass genocide to get away from his abusive and neglectful father, became somewhat sympathetic in later seasons. It’s to Emerson’s credit that such a purposely vague character was given so many layers. He was able to answer the question of why we should care about Ben as anything other than a villain in just one masterful scene.
A climactic showdown in the middle of season four between Ben, holed up in a house, and a shoot-first, ask-questions-later mercenary ended with Ben’s adopted daughter getting killed and Ben speechless. Emerson’s reaction shot, lasting only a few seconds, managed to encapsulate fright, fury, grief, and loathing all with just his eyes. This plus his quick way around a one-liner in the most deadpan way is what makes Ben one of the best characters on television, let alone on Lost. From what happened in the penultimate episode (spoiler alert), Ben will not only make it to the finale (a fact that continues to pleasantly surprise me), but may be back to his old ways. Either way, Emerson’s performance has been a delight, and I can only hope that he’ll find new life on TV, in movies, and on the stage. We know he can play creepy, but how about something more heartwarming? Emerson’s got the chops; can we get around his old roles? I hope so.
Ken Leung
In 1998, Rush Hour was released in theaters. This buddy cop comedy was better than it should have been (yes, I am praising a movie directed by Brett Ratner), and that was mostly due to the weird chemistry between the film’s stars, Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. That said, I remember even as a teenager being struck by the intense performance from the main henchman of the bad guy. The henchman was a wiry Asian man, with bleached blonde hair, and despite looking about 20 years old, he looked like a dude you wouldn’t want to meet in a darkened alley. So it was to my great surprise that Lost proved, a decade later, that the same performer had more to bring to a role than just creepiness. Ken Leung’s evolved as an actor, and done so even during his arc on Lost. As Miles, a snarky guy who has the ability to communicate with the dead, Leung originally made Miles a neo-Sawyer, but has enriched the character over the past three years.
Miles was given the chance, thanks to the craziness of the Season 5 time travel hijinks, to visit his father, a scientist working with the Dharma Initiative, and managed to suppress most of the angst and emotion he had about his long-lost and thought-to-be-embittered father, while still making it clear how he felt. Leung obviously has the range to perform this role and a henchman in a cheesy action comedy. He came to the attention of the writers of Lost thanks to his role in a late episode of The Sopranos; having not watched that show, I’ll only say that if he can be in The Sopranos, Lost, and Rush Hour, and not disappoint, the guy needs to have offers flooding his doorstop. He’s not got anything lined up yet, but Hollywood needs to take notice of this guy: he could be a lead in a big-budget blockbuster, or he could be part of an indie drama, or anything else. There must be something for him soon, right?
Evangeline Lilly
Of all the cast members on Lost, only one can say that she’s been in a Best Picture winner since the show began. What’s more, the actress who can say this might surprise you (though if you’re a fan of Lost and have seen the movie, you recognized her): Evangeline Lilly, who plays Kate Austen on Lost. Lilly had a small but pivotal role in last year’s Best Picture winner, The Hurt Locker, where she played the sometime-estranged wife of the lead bomb defuser. Seeing as Kate is often maligned as the worst character on the show (or at least the worst original character on the show), why put Lilly here? It’s not just because she’s gorgeous (although that…you know…it helps). No, the final season of Lost has proven that Lilly’s talents have never been the problem. We could criticize the writers, but Lilly’s had plenty of emotional beats to hit this season, and knocked each out of the park.
Lilly is one of two notable cast members who has said that they want to quit the acting game; the other is Matthew Fox, who plays the de facto protagonist of the show, Jack Shephard. Fox has backtracked a bit, saying that he’d rather make movies, as he’s been associated with TV for 15 years (you do remember Party of Five, right?). Lilly’s said the same, but seems to be sticking to it, and that’s a shame. Even if she started out a bit green (her role on Lost is her first major role in pretty much anything), Lilly is an expressive actress, able to show her anguish at the loss of her friends, able to be flirtatious with Fox or Holloway, able to bring a sincere amount of bafflement to the table when any of the science-fiction elements of the series come into play. If she quits, I’ll understand, but I’d love to see her get better-written roles in the future, so we can see that she’s been a lot more talented than we gave her credit for.
Jeff Fahey
Logic aside, there’s probably no way that Jeff Fahey’s ever going to be a star in the future, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve to be the wisecracking side character in every other movie for the next ten years, right? I know, there are probably some of you reading this who are either casual fans of Lost or don’t watch the show who are asking who the hell Jeff Fahey is. Fahey, before coming to Lost, was the title character of The Lawnmower Man, appeared in various TV series, and makes a similarly wisecracking appearance in the Robert Rodriguez-helmed Planet Terror. He came onto Lost at the beginning of the fourth season as helicopter pilot Frank Lapidus, a grouchy, smart, yet alcoholic pilot who came to the Island via freighter. Despite working for some bad dudes, he’d come onto the freighter with some baggage: he not only believed that the Oceanic 815 plane crash found at the bottom of the ocean was a fake (and was right), but he had been meant to fly Oceanic 815 on the fateful day of the crash.
Once there, Frank was on the side of the angels, as long as those angels have a high tolerance for humor. Fahey was always good with a darkly humorous one-liner, even if his character wasn’t as fully developed as some of the others on this list. You may even say that Frank was somewhat unnecessary in season six, but guess what? I don’t care. He became a great audience surrogate, and that’s enough of a purpose for me. Frank’s status is dead (or, if you’re me, presumed dead) thanks to a submarine accident a few weeks back, but Fahey’s career could see a resurgence. He’s appearing in Rodriguez’s next film, Machete, and has a couple other projects coming out. What the guy needs are weightier roles that don’t skimp on the humor. I can’t think of a great specific role for Fahey, but someone else aside from Rodriguez and the Lost writers have to see this man’s potential, and fast.