Lost's Matthew Fox: 'I really thought I was done with the business'

Well, Matthew Fox has been found. Alive and relatively healthy, by the looks of it. Thirteen years ago, we watched him and a dozen other castaways stride into the light in the ambiguous, puzzling finale of Lost, ABC’s pioneering sci-fi adventure drama. As Dr Jack Shephard, the permanently bestubbled and intensely earnest surgeon, Fox was the show’s moral core: the very first scene opened with his eye; six seasons later, the very last closed with it.

Once he managed to reach dry land, the actor seemed to have the world at his feet – Lost was a critical hit and an awards-laden ratings monster. Only, at the time, Fox repeatedly vowed he was “done with television”, and instead wanted to focus on his big-screen career. And he did, for a bit, appearing in a handful of films including World War Z and Alex Cross, before he was seemingly done with them, too. A clutch of serious allegations relating to his private life followed, all of which he strenuously denied, aside from admitting to a drink-driving arrest and a fight on a bus.

And then, in 2015, Fox simply disappeared. An early retirement? A quiet, better-safe-than-sorry cancellation? Self-imposed exile? Theories abounded, but a chiselled face once inescapable on US TV had vanished. 

By the end of the decade, when you searched anything related to his name or characters, Google suggested a frequently asked question: “What happened to the actor who played Jack on Lost?” It still does.

Hearing this today, Fox chuckles proudly. “Does it? That’s great. I am very comfortable with that. If I could continue to work on projects that I love, with great people, and still have that question pop up, it’d be pretty cool.” I’ve located him in a hotel in central London, where he’s doing publicity for an unlikely comeback project, an Australian screwball comedy called C*A*U*G*H*T.

At 57, the once constant buzz cut is now longer, silver and aggressively combed to one side. He is heavily tattooed, tall and wiry as an endurance cyclist, wearing a tucked-in white T-shirt, hiking fleece, utility trousers and chunky boots. His resting face is “open but wary”; the overall effect “US military veteran who’s seen some stuff”. Where on earth has he been?

“I basically told the people I work with that I’m not interested. I really thought I was done with the business,” Fox admits. There were, he says, “a lot of factors”. 

Ruling himself out of television was born of pure exhaustion. Fox first earned fame as one of the leads in the 1990s teen drama Party of Five, which, like Lost, lasted for six series. Together, “that’s almost 300 hours of television,” he says, wide-eyed. He also wanted to spend time with his then-teenage children. “I had missed a lot of time at home. My wife [of 31 years, Margherita Ronchi] and I have always played good cop/bad cop when it comes to parenting. I was bad cop – and my daughter was crying out for some bad cop.”

It helped, too, he says, that he’d checked off most of his bucket list: do a play in the West End (Neil LaBute’s In a Forest, Dark and Deep in 2011), lead a film (Emperor, with Tommy Lee Jones, in 2012) and star in a Western (2015’s Bone Tomahawk).

Financially comfortable after Lost, Fox could afford to dwell on other pursuits, or at least absorb some enforced years in the wilderness. He has a pilot’s licence and owns a plane, so wanted to spend more time flying; he also makes music – “but I’m shy about it”. Later, before the pandemic, the family moved to northern Italy, from where his wife hails.

“Secretly, the people I work with probably thought I’ll want to tell more stories. And that did happen. After four or five years, I realised storytelling is a really important part of who I am.”

But whatever the truth, C*A*U*G*H*T is, at least, a lively way to make a comeback. Written by (and co-starring) Kick Gurry, it sees four Australian soldiers sent on a mission to the fictional war-torn island nation of Behati-Prinsloo, where they are captured and kept hostage, along with a pair of Americans. While there, they produce a hostage video that goes viral and makes them famous.

It’s slightly bizarre, deeply silly, impressively bolstered by appearances from executive producer Sean Penn and his old pal Susan Sarandon, and now postponed. Though it was due to air this week, ITV has wisely decided that some of the show’s themes chime a little too much with news reports from Israel and Palestine.

Fox, who first met Gurry when they made the film Speed Racer together in 2006, joined the production in lockdown, having just made a low-key comeback in the US miniseries Last Light. He plays one of the captured Americans: a hyper-masculine, hyper-selfish alpha male.

“I just loved it; it made fun of a lot of things I felt needed to be made fun of, but talked also about fame and how immediate and sought-after fame has become, how TikTok fame has become a kind of heaven to people.”

Between his character, Lieutenant Pete, and Penn’s impressively knowing self-parody, the US hero complex is frequently the butt of the joke. “I feel like America is not terribly good at making fun of itself, so I enjoy being able to do that.”

It must also be a way of poking fun at himself, I say. The mostly humourless Party of Five was, he concedes, “overly dramatic”. In Lost he was the unsmiling, heavy-breathing one. And in the late Noughties, Fox cultivated a reputation for being one of the most earnest leading men in Hollywood. Interviewed in The Daily Telegraph in 2010, he struck the writer as “[taking] himself more seriously than almost anyone I’ve ever met. Looking at my notes afterwards, I see that I’ve written, rather shakily, ‘My God, it’s like talking to a tree.’”

“Maybe, I suppose,” he says today. “The only comedy I’ve ever presented to people was hosting Saturday Night Live. Once you get known on some level, the audience are only going to see you in a certain way. And then it gets increasingly difficult to go, ‘Honestly, I can be really funny and I have a really dry and weird sense of humour.’ It’s part of the reason I said yes.”

Raised in rural Wyoming, Fox is the son of a rancher who grew barley for Coors beer. He grew up quickly: he once told Playboy that, aged 12, he lost his virginity to a girl two years older than him, “on the ground by a river while a rodeo was going on in town”. An economics major, he found acting after a stint as a model, but Party of Five didn’t lead to immediate follow-on success.

Then came Lost. One of the television events of the decade, it meant Fox joined a group of jobbing actors (Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston, Mad Men’s Jon Hamm, and, before them, The Sopranos’ James Gandolfini) vaulted into the big time by leading shows that lifted television to the artistic and ambition level of cinema.

Lost, which was Lord of the Flies on LSD, took its toll. Fox and his young family spent six years living on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, as Damon Lindelof and JJ Abrams, the show’s creators, worked out what on earth to do with the plane-crash victims stuck on a seemingly enchanted island in the Pacific. “It went on longer than it should have,” Fox admits now. “I definitely got fatigue.”

When people recognise him, which is rare these days, it’s invariably to ask what the ending meant. “I always say, ‘I have noooo idea’,” he laughs. “The show asked so many questions, so the notion that all those questions would be answered in the final hour isn’t realistic. And if people need to know how the polar bear got there, then they’re kind of missing the point.”

He keeps in touch with only a couple of people from Party of Five and nobody at all from Lost. That is not a lot of friends from 12 years of work. But he shrugs. A job is a job. “I’ve always maintained that I love between ‘action’ and ‘cut’, it’s everything else that comes with it I’m not super keen on.”

Just to be clear, though, he is back, yes? He was in Lost, now he is found. 

“Yeah, I think so,” he says, slowly nodding and looking around, as if to weigh up whether it’s all worth it. “If I can find the right opportunities, I’m back. I missed it.” 

*C*A*U*G*H*T will be available on ITVX at a later date