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A familiar face finally makes it big

Terry O'Quinn has spent his career being one of the world's many journeyman actors. At 52, his role as Lost's Locke has landed him in paradise, in more ways than one.

By FRAZIER MOORE, Associated Press
Published March 6, 2005

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

Locke was stranded on a tropical island with dozens of other passengers after their jetliner crashed in the first episode. 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 shlub. 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, whom Lost viewers 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?' " he says.

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 to 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.

What he does know is that Lost is a genre-busting smash, by turns thrilling, spooky and tantalizing. From its September premiere, it has had critics agog and viewers snagged. (It airs at 8 p.m. Wednesday on WFTS-Ch. 28.)

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? face, O'Quinn has been around plenty. His 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 that also includes 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 former member of the Iraqi Republican Guard) 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."

The series is filmed on Oahu, with five or six of each episode's eight shooting days spent outdoors, often at the beach location on the island's north shore.

The pilot was shot there a year ago. Filming resumed July 15, which happened to be O'Quinn's 52nd birthday.

Revealing his bent for numerology, O'Quinn notes that five and two equal seven, and that July is the seventh month, then reels off other instances of seven looming large in his life.

"I told Lori, "Things are at a crossroads. And if Lost isn't the crossroads, it's the bridge to the other side.' I believe in fate," he says.

Fate has been mighty good to Lost. But even a believer like O'Quinn has kept his head: "I'm always being the old warrior, telling everybody, "Don't buy a house. Let's be patient and see how it goes. Do good work. That's all.' "

A native of a small town on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, O'Quinn fell into acting in his teens. As his college graduation neared, "I didn't want to look for a real job. So I decided to see if I could make it as an actor," he says.

He met Lori a few years later when, appearing in a play in Baltimore, he learned he was cast in Michael Cimino's Western epic Heaven's Gate. With a sudden need for riding lessons, he tracked down Lori, an instructor on her family's farm outside the city.

When his play closed and he ran out of money waiting to be summoned to Montana to shoot his scenes, he struck a deal with Lori's parents to muck stalls in exchange for a room and more lessons. Three months later, in September 1979, he left to do Heaven's Gate. In November he and Lori were married. Heaven's Gate was a legendary disaster. But the couple have been together 25 years (which adds up to seven).

With their two sons off at college, "I feel like we're back to how we were when we first got together," O'Quinn says. On Oahu, they rent a house in the hills "with live boar outside our window and cocks crowing in the morning. It's paradise."

On a recent Lost, Locke declared that "Everyone gets a new life on this island." And that maybe includes the actor who plays him, a long-familiar face who might at last be a star.

"It would be nice to think about more doors opening, to be able to pick and choose roles," O'Quinn says. "But I'm not anxious to go anywhere else right now. I could do this for a while."

[Last modified March 3, 2005, 10:57:04]