He was the lead star of “Lost,” but actor Matthew Fox has been essentially retired from acting for nearly a decade.
After the ABC series ended, he had a role in “World War Z” that mostly ended on the cutting room floor, and roles in some smaller movies like “Extinction,” the Tyler Perry-led “Alex Cross” and the wartime drama “Emperor”.
The actor also had some public scuffles including an alleged incident in Cleveland in 2011-2012 with the actor subsequently refuting the allegations aimed against him strenuously and repeatedly.
His last role was alongside Kurt Russell and Patrick Wilson in S. Craig Zahler’s critically acclaimed low-budget cult horror-western “Bone Tomahawk”. Since he wrapped filming of that project in 2014, he hasn’t worked in the film or TV industry at all.
That changes with MGM’s apocalyptic thriller series “Last Light” which had its world premiere Friday at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival and will stream via Peacock.
Speaking with Variety about why he left the industry for nearly a decade, he says:
“I kind of had a bucket list in my mind of things that I wanted to accomplish in the business, and after I did ‘Bone Tomahawk’ in 2014 that had kind of completed the bucket list. I wanted to do a Western. It’s a very odd Western, but it’s a Western. And so that sort of completed the bucket list.
At that time in my life, our kids were at an age where I felt like I needed to really re-engage. I had been focused on work for some time, and [my wife] Margherita had been running the family so beautifully, but I felt like it was time to be home, and I really felt like I was retiring from the business, and working on other creative elements that are really personal to me – some music and writing.”
The offer to join this series, which hails from director Dennie Gordon who previously worked with Fox on “Party of Five,” brought him back along with the promise of executive producing which he’d never done before:
“It just all kind of came together. It felt like it was the moment to jump back in, and see how it felt to be in front of a camera again and to act again. And it was surprisingly rewarding… storytelling is in my DNA in some way, and I felt like this form of storytelling was something that I wanted to reengage with, and see how it felt. And I’m really happy that I did so – it’s been good.”
“Last Light” is set in a society plunged into chaos when oil supplies are jeopardized. Fox both executive produces and stars in the series as a petrochemical engineer while Joanne Froggatt co-stars as his wife.
Source: TV Line
