Actor insists his Lost character isn't so bad after all

Actor insists his Lost character isn't so bad after all

April 17, 2007, 7:01PM
By ANDREW DANSBY
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Questions and Answers:

For all of Lost 's secrecy, there's little mystery about its fans: Many are sleuths and a little obsessive, playing with acronyms, hunting down lyrics to obscure Kinks songs and knitting together theories about the show's vast mythology.

While cynics may scoff that a cloud of jungle smoke is just a cloud of jungle smoke, Michael Emerson is not among them.

"I fully understand it, all of the stuff in Lost — it's there on purpose. All that stuff (executive producers) Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof are playing with, it's not for kicks. Sometimes they'll tease something for a year or two and then pay it off handsomely"

He also suggests a payoff is coming soon.

A few contributors on thefuselage.com chipped in with questions our Lost blogger passed along. Emerson, like his character, was vague, teasing and possibly honest.

Q: Does Ben the character feel physical or emotional pain?

A: Oh, I think both. He certainly feels psychological pain.

Q: Does Ben know anything about the four-toed statue?

A: No. Well, I don't. Though I had occasion to talk to the sculptor at a party the other night. He said they still have it in storage. It's considered a working prop.

Q: Is Jacob an acronym for Just Another Con of Ben's?

A: I have heard that. Moreover, we have had cause to discuss it within the past few days in our work. But there is not an answer.

Obviously, Lost's creators can't spill all the beans this season since the show has been renewed for a fourth. So Therese Odell, who writes the Chronicle's Lost blog (blogs.chron.com/tubular), lists five questions the show's fans would like answered by the end of this season and five that can wait . . . for now:

We need to know:

• Why are the Others on the island?

• What's the deal with the polar bears?

• Is Christian (Jack and Claire's father) alive on the island?

• Who is the father of Sun's baby?

• Did Walt and Michael really escape?

These can wait:

• What is the "magic box"?

• Where is the island?

• Why can't anyone (including God, according to Ben) see the island or get off the island?

• Will the survivors ever go home?

• Are the connections between the characters significant, or is it all merely coincidence?

If Michael Emerson, the wide-eyed actor who plays the mysterious leader of the Others on Lost, seems to relish the cunning ambiguity of his character, he can be forgiven. For a theater guy, he's taken a beating on TV.

Previously, Emerson's best-known small-screen role was an Emmy-winning arc in The Practice that ended with his character's decapitation. Even Lost had him roughed up by his captors (the "good" guys) in the second season.

So Emerson, 52, has infused Ben Linus with gentle menace or devious calm, take your pick. As a stage veteran, he creates uneasiness with the tools at hand: his twitchy blue eyes and his crisp, soothing voice. It's a drama that doesn't rely on incidental music or pyrotechnics.

Lost isn't without bombast. It blew a plane out of the sky and spawned various sorts of jungle menaces, from polar bears to mysterious black smoke. Still, Lost fanatics buzz loudly about quiet Ben — who insists he, too, is a good guy.

Emerson doesn't help Ben's cause when he informs, frankly, that in the land of Lost, "the day will come when we find out who he's really fighting. And it will make your hair stand on end. You'll wish Ben had been badder.

"Something's coming. And whatever it is will make the battle between the Lostaways and the Others pale."

He also mentions some business about "bloodshed on the horizon," but it's hard to be concerned about anything as specific as bloodshed with that "something" having been said in a voice that sounds just enough like Ben's to cause worry.

On the topic of villains, Emerson suggests Ben's perceived creepiness is America's fault, not the character's. When Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter is mentioned, he says that role was part of "a great tradition: that of the gentleman villain.

"We find that kind of character particularly scary in America, but I don't think it works as well in other places. But we have such a bias against education. A bias against people who speak well. We like men of action. When confronted by a smooth-talking intellectual, we impose a subtext on them. People think Ben Linus is the wickedest man ever seen. But what can we actually charge him with? Very little. Where's the body count? Other people on that show have much more blood on their hands."

True, though it should be stated that Lecter also ate somebody's face on-screen and had peculiar culinary accompaniments to his fava beans and chianti.

Emerson — who in interviews often comes across as homesick for the New York stage — seems enamored of playing this question-mark character. He seems to be enjoying his time in Hawaii, where the show shoots, though his work environment has changed.

"I had light duty, mostly indoor stuff, always in hatches or underground chambers," he says. "Working in the comfort of air conditioning.

"Suddenly I have three weeks of tramping through jungles, standing on windy rocks — it's dirty and buggy and crazy. The places the rest of the cast has been the entire time. They have no sympathy."

Similar to how the castaways feel about Ben. Until Lost serves up some sort of new menace — phantom or otherwise — he's going to have to be its gentleman villain. Emerson seems a fit for the part, since he does defiantly bookish things like holding a grudge against John Wilkes Boothe for giving American theater a bad name and answering a question about Hawaii by referencing Mark Twain's time there as documented in Roughing It.

Unlike the scheming Ben, though, Emerson is rather humble about what he brings to Lost. He calls himself "a small cog" and several times deflects credit to the show's writers. Even the cast is caught up in the show's mysteries. Emerson mentions a group of them gathered recently to bat about ideas. "We were reading bits of script like tea leaves."

No luck there.

Emerson promises the season's remaining episodes will be thrilling and satisfying to fans, though even he doesn't know how they end. He's shot scenes for episodes out of sequence, and then there are the notorious secret scenes about which the cast is kept in the dark until the last moment.

The production, as he describes it, seems to be controlled chaos.

"I'd love to be a fly on the wall at some of the writing sessions," he says.

As for those tea leaves in his possession, they have him feeling optimistic. "Based on my reading of the scripts, I think I might make it," he says. "I certainly hope to be on the show next season.

"It always gets our attention when we get secret scenes. Last season, I was called for a day of work on a secret scene. No script, nothing. Just show up. That was the day we killed Ana-Lucia. So you never know."

andrew.dansby@chron.com

Source: chron.com