If your job is covering TV and not, say, Somali warlords, you do not expect ever to conduct an interview with someone who is holding a deadly weapon the entire time. But then I talked to Terry O’Quinn, in his trailer on location with Lost, last month. O’Quinn was sent, as a souvenir, an inscribed hunting knife from the SOG company, in honor of John Locke’s having done so much to publicize the virtues of big-ass cutlery. (You really should watch that video.) The entire time we talked, he was tending to the knife—cleaning it, admiring it, tightening screws on the hilt, which ended in a pyramid-shaped point. “You can do all kinds of other damage with that,” he said. “Break glass, break skulls.”
I was exceedingly polite.
I crammed in several sit-downs between scenes with the actors (except Matthew Fox, who I talked to over the phone), so the interviews were necessarily a bit rushed. Here, then, some highlights, starting with the man with the big knife:
