Michael Emerson isn’t too worried about Lost viewers deflecting… and if they do, he feels they weren’t really fans anyway!
“I think the appetite is well whetted at this point,” said Emerson in a telephone interview with The Buffalo News. “Those who might drop away weren’t that serious about it anyway.”
Emerson on Henry Gale:
“I didn’t expect to be on the show this long,” said Emerson. “But they saw what they had wrought. They began to see they had a really cool idea. Maybe when they saw the dailies, they thought, ‘this actor is right for this idea.’ Let’s run with it awhile and see what develops. Had I not worked out and had the idea of the character not worked out, they could have easily killed me off and gone in another direction.”
“No one really discussed where the role was going with me. I just flew to Hawaii one day in January of 2006 and the next morning I was hanging from some vein of a palm tree. There was some point in the early going when I was playing Henry Gale and we were rehearsing a scene, one of those sort of ambiguous scenes, I thought to myself, ‘wouldn’t it be a blast if it turned out that not only was I something scary, but I was the head scary guy.’ Of course, that’s actually what it turned into.”
Emerson on the Flashforwards:
“The writers brilliantly opened the door to a third dimension of time of storytelling,” said Emerson. “So from now on, we will have sort of a threetiered structure. There will be present, past and future. And the future — those scenes you saw post-island — are going to be more and more important. And they are going to make this a really adult program. They are full of the kind of ironies and regrets and sadnesses that are going to make this kind of grown up.”
Emerson believes the third dimension idea “has been in co- [creator] Damon Lindelof’s head forever.”
But other things had to be placed in the writers’ heads. For instance, Emerson’s actress wife, Carrie Preston, appeared as Ben’s mother in a flashback.
“It came about as a joke at first at a cocktail party,” said Emerson. “Somehow the producers heard about our little joke and, when the time came for that episode, they thought ‘why not?’ It was fun.”