'Lost' helps O'Quinn
find elusive star turn

By FRAZIER MOORE

updated 4:15 p.m. ET Feb. 24, 2005

NEW YORK - As the mysterious Locke on ABC’s suspenseful “Lost,” Terry O’Quinn glories in his rich role.

Locke, of course, was stranded on a tropical island with dozens of other passengers after their jetliner crashed in the opener. Since then, he has emerged as the series’ mystical patriarch, a shamanic presence living his back-to-nature dream after a lifetime spent as a clerical schlub. Or is he just a nut job acting out a long Wild Man Weekend? Or a psycho ready to blow?

Don’t ask O’Quinn, who “Lost” viewers first met planted on the beach silently gazing out to sea. While the camera rolled, “I tried to think of heavy things: ‘What does this mean?’ That’s what I thought. And ‘What the hell do we do now?”’

Months later, he is still not sure if Locke is sinister or noble, delusional or divine — or all the above. And he was as surprised as anyone by perhaps the series’ most electrifying episode. Locke, in a flashback before the flight, was revealed to have been a paraplegic. Then, seen in the present on the beach, he rose, almost biblically, to his feet: Somehow he was healed!

“I didn’t even know that I had been handicapped until we shot that episode,” O’Quinn says with a laugh.

What he does know is that “Lost” is a genre-busting smash (by turns thrilling, spooky and tantalizing) that, from its September premiere, had critics agog and viewers snagged. (It airs 8 p.m. ET Wednesday.)

He also knows that “Lost” is steady, challenging work for a journeyman actor who has waited 30 years for this kind of break.

A rangy man with a shaved head and a where-have-I-seen-that-guy? kind of face, O’Quinn has been around plenty. Films include 1984’s “Places in the Heart,” the “X-Files” feature, “Old School” and (in the title role) 1987’s horror classic “The Stepfather.” He has been on Broadway, and his scads of TV appearances include recurring roles on “JAG,” “The West Wing” and the spy series “Alias,” which was created by J.J. Abrams, the mastermind of “Lost.”

But as 2004 began, O’Quinn and his wife, Lori, had logged “a couple of years from hell.” An actor who has chosen never to live in Los Angeles and long ago took his leave from New York, “I was at home in Maryland, no work, nothing going on. I told Lori, ‘We gotta toughen up. We can fold, or we can lean on each other and play the cards that were dealt us.’

“Then J.J. called about ‘Lost.’ I said, ‘I’ll take it’ — not a strong negotiation stance.

“He said, ‘You won’t have a lot to do in the pilot, but it will develop into a more satisfying role.’ I said, ‘I’ll still take it.’ I counted my blessings, and Lori and I flew to Hawaii.”

On “Lost,” O’Quinn joined an enormous cast of featured regulars who also include Matthew Fox (as a sexy doctor), Evangeline Lilly (a dishy jailbird), Dominic Monaghan (a rock-star junkie), Jorge Garcia (a fat guy who says “Dude” a lot), Naveen Andrews (a terrorist?) and eight others. In all, there are supposedly 48 refugees trying to gain rescue and, in the meantime, forge some semblance of a civilized community.

Good luck. Desperation and conflict keep these castaways at odds. Spectral beasts and island cohabitants stalk them. And everyone, it seems, has secrets — secrets to which even the actors aren’t privy until each script arrives.

Otherwise, O’Quinn reports, the show’s producers “don’t tell anybody much about what’s going to happen, or has happened before. But I don’t have any problem with that. I go on what I’ve got. It gives me the freedom to play things the way I want. Then, if they want it another way, I do it another way.”

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