Lost's Sensitive Action Hero

(2 of 2)

Fox also says he needed to wait for the right movie, passing on the teen-horror scripts that came flooding in as Lost became a hit. After spending his first hiatus from the show unemployed with his family in their house in Hawaii, he spent all this past summer working--first on We Are Marshall and then on this fall's Vantage Point, with Forest Whitaker and William Hurt. To fit both of these into his break, he had to persuade ABC and Warner Bros., the studio behind Marshall, to make a lot of compromises. (Fox's hair may have been a little red--as it is for the movie--for the last few episodes of Lost last season.) He also had to convince Red Dawson, the coach he played in We Are Marshall, who was deeply suspicious of the film, to fly out to Hawaii, where Lost is shot, and talk about the plane crash, something Dawson has rarely done in 36 years. "It was a little awkward for an hour or two," Dawson says. "But he's from a small town, and I grew up in Valdosta, Ga. We hit it off real well."

That's Fox's great skill: he's the homecoming king who's somehow interested in you. Dawson is planning a fishing trip with him. I, for one, am convinced that Fox cares deeply about what music I listen to, even though I own every Billy Joel album and he's good friends with Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day.

Fox finds everyone interesting; that's why he's good at his job. Not just because studying people is the job of any actor but also because it's so much a part of his personality that even his characters are people studiers, rather than talkers. As a bonus, the audience sees things in his silences: intelligence, empathy, toughness. And, of course, if that doesn't get them, the tears are sure to do it.