“We have to go back!” – Jack Shephard
Matthew Fox didn’t make it to the “Lost” 10th Anniversary Reunion panel last night at PaleyFest 2014, but several of his former co-stars came out to join “Lost” co-creator Damon Lindelof and co-showrunner, Carlton Cuse.
Of the massive “Lost” cast, Josh Holloway, Jorge Garcia, Yunjin Kim, Ian Somerhalder, Maggie Grace, Henry Ian Cusick and Malcolm David Kelley were in attendance as moderator Paul Scheer got things off to a light start by asking the panelists what they stole from the “Lost” set now that the statute of limitations has passed.
Lindelof jokingly noted the presence of ABC executives in the audience before saying “Maybe the cover of the hatch fell off of a truck? And then I found it and made it into a coffee table.” Cuse added “this package just arrived and it was like the countdown clock from the hatch! It just showed up at my house!” Garcia admitted that “Hurley’s two paintings from the mental institution… or something very much similar to them hangs in my bedroom” while Kim and Grace admitted to keeping some of the outfits that their characters wore on the show.
Before the panel began, “Exodus: Part 1” was screened for the PaleyFest attendees. That was the first part of the first season finale of “Lost,” which was written by Cuse and Lindelof and directed by Jack Bender.
Lindelof and Cuse were effusive in their praise of Bender and the rest of the directors for exceeding their vision of what “Lost” could be.”When you normally make television, I think there’s always kind of a disappointment,” explained Cuse. “Because you imagine something in your head and it doesn’t come out as good as you expect. And the thing that was really amazing about Lost – and the moment when I think I really realized that the show was gonna be special – was stuff would come back better. The execution was so great, what Jack [Bender] was doing in Hawaii and the other directors was so good, it was actually better than what we had imagined on the page in many cases.”
Recalling “Exodus,” Grace mentioned that she was mooned by some of her male castmates and the female dog that portrayed Vincent “improvised” the bit where she swam out to the raft and swam back to the shore. Lindelof joked that the dog was always going off script before someone else on the panel added “and then she got a DUI!”
Shortly after that, Cuse shared a story about Terry O’Quinn’s close encounter with a fan in Hawaii, Misery-style! “One day, [Terry] hitched a ride in a pickup truck… and they drove past Terry’s street and he got a little nervous. He goes ‘what are you doing?’ ‘Oh, I have to show you to my husband!’”
When asked about the best fan theories about the nature of the show, Garcia noted that “I had a guy once say that when the plane was in the air, we were all cloned. And the story of ‘Lost’ was really the story of our clones.”
Holloway added a tale of his own by saying “I remember once… I looked at [Lindelof] and said ‘the island is like the Death Star. It moves.’ and you [Lindelof] got weird with me. And I said ‘I did not say that. And I am shutting up and I am never talking about the show again.’ I was afraid of [being killed off].”
Speaking of character deaths, Lindelof remarked that Somerhalder took the news well when he was told that his character, Booth would be dying soon. “The idea with Boone was basically, we wanted to defy this television convention,” explained Cuse. “ If you want an episode of ‘CSI’ (Miami) and somebody puts a gun to David Caruso’s head you pretty much know that they’re not going pull the trigger. The idea that we could kill a character who was beloved was something that we felt would give the show an incredible energy. Because then no one was safe.”
Photo Credit: Michael Kovac for Paley Center for Media
