I have some fan questions.  I’m going to read them word for word.  Did Ben and the Others know what would happen if the button wasn’t pushed or did they think it was just part of a Dharma experiment?

I think they knew in general what would happen, but not in particular. 

Do people come up to you on the street and ask you questions as if you are the character, kind of like this person did?

(laughs) People do that, yeah they do.  Another thing people like to do is come up and give me capsule criticisms of the show, you know.  I remember in Honolulu, a couple from New Zealand stopped to tell me that since I had come on the show that they had stopped watching it because it had gotten too dark, too scary.  They didn’t feel like it was a hopeful and humanistic story like it had been originally.  I said, “Well, wait a minute, I’m going to call J.J. [Abrams] and pass that along.”

Are people pretty respectful of you when you run into them in public?

They are, they are. It’s interesting.  It has a little something to do with the character that I play.  I see when Josh and Jorge are in public and people feel like they’re pals with those characters, you know, Hurley.  People feel like they can go up and slap them on the back and buy them a beer and that kind of thing. But people are a little more formal with me and I think it’s just because of the character that I play.  You know, people keep a sort of polite distance from me and they tend to say, “excuse me” and call me Mr. Emerson (laughs).

The next reader question:  Last season there was a scene where your character said, “If I told you about them, you have know idea what He’ll do and He’ll kill me,” obviously speaking of the mysterious Him.  At that point did they know that you’d go on to play the leader of the Others?  Did you know that you were going to have this authority position with the Others or were you really playing that from the vulnerable standpoint?

Well that was one of those days where I had to have a little chat with the director.  Already by then, even that early on I thought, “there’s more to me than meets the eye.”  I said to the director, because the director came and said, “I need you to be really terrified of Him.”  And I said, “Okay, I’ll do it, but what if I’m Him?”  And he said, “I can’t talk about that,” and walked away from me.  So we played it as if there was someone that Ben was terrified of.  You can either chalk that up to him being a good actor, if the Him in question was himself, or maybe there is somebody out there.  I think there’s somebody else coming down the line.   In fact, there almost needs to be.  This whole dance we’ve been doing on the border of whether Ben is a good guy or a bad guy, I think the presence of someone more powerful and more malevolent will make that really nicely ambiguous again.  If our sympathy suddenly shifts toward Ben, that will be interesting.

To a lot of fans it seems like the Others are doing what they are doing as an act of self preservation, not that they want to be kidnappers but that they have another force working against them.

I agree.  I’ve always felt that.  You know when you play a villain, you kind of have to make a positive back-story for yourself.  It helps you live with the character you’re playing and justify things.  So that was sort of where my head was at from the get go.  I think it’s being sort of played out and I think it’s proving to be true.

Certainly you can see most of the Others being redeemable characters.  We’ve already seen that with Juliet and even with Ben.  We’ve seen just enough of a soft, humorous side to him to be able to accept him in a hero turn for sure. 

Right.  I mean you see him as a father and as a member of a book club and stuff like that.  And you think, “God, that doesn’t exactly sound like an evil mastermind.”  Doesn’t it feel like they have something on their plate that is so scary and so important that they have to take fairly drastic measures that sometimes appear to be wicked?

He could be the nice Dad next door that lives next door that just happens to work for Wetworks CIA, you just don’t know.

Yeah, exactly, that kind of thing.

This final user question: Is there one thing that you can tell us about your character that you wish the viewers knew?

Wow, that I wish the viewers knew… Oh. Something that’s been sort of at the back of my mind and sort of simmering underneath my playing this season is that he’s a romantic.  And that he longs for a different life than the one he’s leading. He’s trapped in a kind of life. He’s a man either born at exactly the right time or exactly the wrong time and he has to push on.  He has to play the hand that he’s been dealt but he may not be crazy about it.  I think he wishes for a softer life and softer relationships (laughs). 

Now that he is aware of a romantic entanglement between Jack and Juliet, is that going to be a major factor for your character in the upcoming episodes?

I don’t think Ben lets emotions get in the way of his work very much.  I think that’s just one more sort of sad item to add to the list of regrets in his life.  If only it could have been different.

Can we expect to see Ben in the fourth season at this point or is that an unknown? 

That’s an unknown.  I would like to be seen in the forth season.  Sort of truly and technically speaking, I don’t think anyone could say for sure until about the same time this season wraps up. I mean you can count on certain lead characters to be there as long as the show is there.  But I don’t know, I’m waiting to see.  I’d like to figure out what to do with myself for the rest of my life if this isn’t going to go on!  You just don’t know.  It is a gypsy life, I swear.

If you didn’t get a fourth season, are you being offered a lot of villain type roles at this point?

I’m not getting a lot of offers of any sort to tell you the truth.  Partly it is, I suppose maybe people call my agents and inquire about my availability and they hear from my agent that my availability is zero.  I’m sort of tied up working on this show.  There may be some little opportunities, maybe drips and drabs of film work could come up, but they would have to fit neatly into the sort of Lost framework.  It will be hard to tell whether there’s life after Lost until Lost is really done.


(Interview Conducted by Jon Lachonis)
Image Courtesy of ABC