Post by bobdoc on May 2, 2008 20:27:40 GMT -4
A London newspaper called the Telegraph conducted an interview with Michael, presumably while he was shooting there. It appears London Lost viewers haven't seen "Shape" yet, so that's why Michael isn't discussing elements from that one. From www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/05/03/bvlost103.xml
Lost's big question: why is this man so scary?
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 03/05/2008
As the long-running plane-crash drama returns to the small screen, its sinister star, Michael Emerson, tells Michael Deacon he's as surprised by the plot twists as viewers are.
In 2004, an American study suggested that watching a lot of television could reduce a child's attention span. Parents, help is at hand. Sit your offspring in front of Sky One at 9pm tomorrow. Because if there's a television drama that actually increases the attention span, it's Lost.
The American thriller serial about plane-crash survivors stranded on a remote tropical island is about to reach its 80th episode. And still its mysteries are multiplying, getting ever more complex and strange. At first, viewers were asking, "Why did the plane crash? How will the survivors get home?" Now they're asking, "Who or what is the invisible and presumably malevolent spirit that lives in the hut in the jungle and answers (occasionally) to the name of Jacob?"
Keeping up with this tangle of riddles, exciting though it is, requires stamina. Happily for its producers, millions have it. In the US, Lost is watched by about 13 million people per episode; here, it's more than a million, which isn't bad for a programme available only on digital.
Tomorrow, the second half of season four begins. (The split was caused by the American television writers' strike.) Faithful viewers will tune in because they yearn for answers. But they'll also tune in for something else: television's scariest villain.
Michael Emerson plays Ben Linus. So scary is Ben that, when fans bump into Emerson in the street, they're scared of him, too.
"People are guarded with me," says Emerson, who was nominated for an Emmy last year for his work on Lost; he won one in 2001 for his guest role in a legal drama called The Practice, in which he played a serial killer. "They tend to be not too chummy, and they don't invade my physical space much. 'Hello, Mr Emerson,' they say. And when they shake hands, they hold themselves at a slight distance. I think they're afraid I'm going to whip something out on them. What that might be, I don't know…"
Ben leads a ruthless gang called The Others, who lived on the island before the plane crashed; at present he's a captive of Locke (played by Terry Quinn), the most enigmatic of the plane-crash survivors. Yet even as a captive Ben seems threatening. Impressive, given his build: he's short, scrawny, rat-like. He looks as if he lost his eyebrows in a small explosion. He talks quietly, in a menacingly measured drawl… with lots of pauses and emphases… which make him sound as if he knows… everything.
Remarkably, Ben was originally written as a minor character. Emerson was hired to appear for only a few episodes, in season two. But so skin-tinglingly sinister was he during those episodes that the producers had a rethink and turned Ben into perhaps Lost's most important character.
"I think it's the imaginations of viewers that make Ben scary," says Emerson (who isn't at all scary himself; polite, precise and elegantly suited, he comes across like a nicer version of Frasier's Niles Crane).
"He's not an imposing figure, not an overwhelming personality - he runs in neutral gear a lot. We fear the things we don't know or can't figure out, so maybe he falls into that category." We'll be seeing plenty of this seemingly unknowable creature in the new episodes. Particularly in a setting new to Lost: London. Previously, all Lost's scenes have been shot on Hawaii or mainland America.
The reasons for shooting in London, I'm afraid, will remain unclear until we see the new episodes; the most Emerson will say is that "I don't know if it's a quality of light [the producers] are looking for, or maybe the weather…" But then, it's almost always impossible to squeeze upcoming storylines out of Lost's stars.
For one thing, they don't know much more about what's going to happen next than we do. Emerson says he's only one script ahead of the viewers, and that sometimes an actor will open the latest script and find that their character is dead. That's it; the first they know of it. Indeed, so secretive are Lost's producers that they don't even let their cleaners have keys to their office in Los Angeles. When the cleaners come in, the producers stand by watchfully to ensure that there's no sneaking a peek at their scripts.
There are critics, though, who no longer want to know what secrets those scripts contain. Their attention spans have been stretched further than they can bear. Too many mysteries, they grumble; not enough answers. And they're not prepared to wait until 2010 - when Lost will conclude - to find out what it all means.
Emerson says he sympathises, a little. "It has always been thus on Lost - more questions than answers. But if they're worried that it's a great tease, then I guess most yarns are a tease - Homer is a tease, Dickens is a tease. Hang on in there. There must be something pleasant about the journey along the way, and I think Lost offers some of those pleasures - at the same time as it strings us along. I don't think [the producers] are any more guilty of that now than they were three years ago."
(One of Lost's teases-in-chief, executive producer Damon Lindelof, promises that, by the end of the final season, all the plot's loose ends will be tied up. Hope we can trust him on that.)
Emerson is unsure how long he himself could survive on a remote island: "Are we talking hours or minutes?" He doesn't have many Boy Scout skills; in the Iowa town where he grew up, "the Boy Scouts were juvenile delinquents, so I didn't last long. I think there was such bad misbehaviour that the troop was broken up." Also, being in the Hawaiian jungle at night unnerves him; while filming there a few weeks ago, he was startled mid-scene by a rush of wild pigs, "large and crazy and semi-dangerous-looking".
Still, he's steeling himself. Only two more years of sudden pig attacks - and other, grander mysteries - to go.
Lost returns to Sky One tomorrow.
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 03/05/2008
As the long-running plane-crash drama returns to the small screen, its sinister star, Michael Emerson, tells Michael Deacon he's as surprised by the plot twists as viewers are.
In 2004, an American study suggested that watching a lot of television could reduce a child's attention span. Parents, help is at hand. Sit your offspring in front of Sky One at 9pm tomorrow. Because if there's a television drama that actually increases the attention span, it's Lost.
The American thriller serial about plane-crash survivors stranded on a remote tropical island is about to reach its 80th episode. And still its mysteries are multiplying, getting ever more complex and strange. At first, viewers were asking, "Why did the plane crash? How will the survivors get home?" Now they're asking, "Who or what is the invisible and presumably malevolent spirit that lives in the hut in the jungle and answers (occasionally) to the name of Jacob?"
Keeping up with this tangle of riddles, exciting though it is, requires stamina. Happily for its producers, millions have it. In the US, Lost is watched by about 13 million people per episode; here, it's more than a million, which isn't bad for a programme available only on digital.
Tomorrow, the second half of season four begins. (The split was caused by the American television writers' strike.) Faithful viewers will tune in because they yearn for answers. But they'll also tune in for something else: television's scariest villain.
Michael Emerson plays Ben Linus. So scary is Ben that, when fans bump into Emerson in the street, they're scared of him, too.
"People are guarded with me," says Emerson, who was nominated for an Emmy last year for his work on Lost; he won one in 2001 for his guest role in a legal drama called The Practice, in which he played a serial killer. "They tend to be not too chummy, and they don't invade my physical space much. 'Hello, Mr Emerson,' they say. And when they shake hands, they hold themselves at a slight distance. I think they're afraid I'm going to whip something out on them. What that might be, I don't know…"
Ben leads a ruthless gang called The Others, who lived on the island before the plane crashed; at present he's a captive of Locke (played by Terry Quinn), the most enigmatic of the plane-crash survivors. Yet even as a captive Ben seems threatening. Impressive, given his build: he's short, scrawny, rat-like. He looks as if he lost his eyebrows in a small explosion. He talks quietly, in a menacingly measured drawl… with lots of pauses and emphases… which make him sound as if he knows… everything.
Remarkably, Ben was originally written as a minor character. Emerson was hired to appear for only a few episodes, in season two. But so skin-tinglingly sinister was he during those episodes that the producers had a rethink and turned Ben into perhaps Lost's most important character.
"I think it's the imaginations of viewers that make Ben scary," says Emerson (who isn't at all scary himself; polite, precise and elegantly suited, he comes across like a nicer version of Frasier's Niles Crane).
"He's not an imposing figure, not an overwhelming personality - he runs in neutral gear a lot. We fear the things we don't know or can't figure out, so maybe he falls into that category." We'll be seeing plenty of this seemingly unknowable creature in the new episodes. Particularly in a setting new to Lost: London. Previously, all Lost's scenes have been shot on Hawaii or mainland America.
The reasons for shooting in London, I'm afraid, will remain unclear until we see the new episodes; the most Emerson will say is that "I don't know if it's a quality of light [the producers] are looking for, or maybe the weather…" But then, it's almost always impossible to squeeze upcoming storylines out of Lost's stars.
For one thing, they don't know much more about what's going to happen next than we do. Emerson says he's only one script ahead of the viewers, and that sometimes an actor will open the latest script and find that their character is dead. That's it; the first they know of it. Indeed, so secretive are Lost's producers that they don't even let their cleaners have keys to their office in Los Angeles. When the cleaners come in, the producers stand by watchfully to ensure that there's no sneaking a peek at their scripts.
There are critics, though, who no longer want to know what secrets those scripts contain. Their attention spans have been stretched further than they can bear. Too many mysteries, they grumble; not enough answers. And they're not prepared to wait until 2010 - when Lost will conclude - to find out what it all means.
Emerson says he sympathises, a little. "It has always been thus on Lost - more questions than answers. But if they're worried that it's a great tease, then I guess most yarns are a tease - Homer is a tease, Dickens is a tease. Hang on in there. There must be something pleasant about the journey along the way, and I think Lost offers some of those pleasures - at the same time as it strings us along. I don't think [the producers] are any more guilty of that now than they were three years ago."
(One of Lost's teases-in-chief, executive producer Damon Lindelof, promises that, by the end of the final season, all the plot's loose ends will be tied up. Hope we can trust him on that.)
Emerson is unsure how long he himself could survive on a remote island: "Are we talking hours or minutes?" He doesn't have many Boy Scout skills; in the Iowa town where he grew up, "the Boy Scouts were juvenile delinquents, so I didn't last long. I think there was such bad misbehaviour that the troop was broken up." Also, being in the Hawaiian jungle at night unnerves him; while filming there a few weeks ago, he was startled mid-scene by a rush of wild pigs, "large and crazy and semi-dangerous-looking".
Still, he's steeling himself. Only two more years of sudden pig attacks - and other, grander mysteries - to go.
Lost returns to Sky One tomorrow.
![Robyn [Emerson-aholic] Avatar](http://c3.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/4/m_530b165192f74b8e9e0ac22cf48f61c6.gif)
