LOST Magazine #28
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LOST Magazine

An excerpt with Josh Holloway (James 'Sawyer' Ford) as featured in issue #28 of The Official LOST Magazine.

Season five was quite the year for Sawyer, and for you as the actor behind the character. The writers really threw everything and the kitchen sink at you to play, from a surprising romance to a Dharma action hero…

Josh Holloway: They did, and the funny thing was that it just kind of happened. Of course, my wife [Yessica Holloway] was pregnant, so my focus was very split. I didn't put a lot of thought into it, it just kind of happened. Sometimes you just wing it and they really gave me some interesting avenues to explore as an actor. Of course, I had a lot of fear and doubts around that, but it was a lot of fun. It turned out really well, I think. It was such a pleasure working with Elizabeth. I really had fun exploring that.

At the beginning of season six, you do get to have some closure with Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) as you bring her up out of the hole. How did you feel about revisiting that place again?

I expected it, but I felt like we did it the best it could be done. We felt they were milking it and it made us angry a little bit. But it's inevitable in that you fall in love with your character if you really are trying to do this right, so the choices that the writers make really matter to you. And yet, you are not the writer, so as an actor, you have to accept it and move forward. We did accept and move forward and found beauty in it. So that experience was amazing.

So after losing Juliet and still being stuck on the island, where is Sawyer now?

Well for me, it's obvious that he doesn't care to live anymore. Everything he ever cared about… he opened himself up and released his survival mechanism in order to fall in love and then got punched again by life, so he's obviously destroyed and hateful towards life. He doesn't care. The trap is to 'one note' that. We are complex as human beings and our emotions live and breathe at both ends of the spectrum at all times. So the challenge is to let the lessons he's learned from being on this island breathe underneath [the performance] – and that is a fine line [to tread]. So anything he experiences – good feelings about life, or good feelings about anybody else – is a betrayal to [Juliet]. There is shame and anger and sadness involved there. All of that has to breathe at the same time, and yet some joy somewhere has to breathe there too. I don't know where that is. I haven't found it yet, but that's the challenge.