We couldn't help but ask ourselves a few questions after hearing that Matthew Fox would be in D.C. to promote his new movie, We Are Marshall. Did he finally get off the island for the interview, or were we just going to be in another one of his flashbacks? How would we get answers out of a man who spent days refusing to cooperate with "the others" in an old empty shark tank? Would it actually be him or just another illusion from the pesky smoke monster?

The real Matthew Fox stepped into the room at the Four Seasons Hotel a week ago in Georgetown dressed for the cold weather wearing a long black jacket and fedora, quite unlike the sun scorched character we are used to seeing. His latest film is based on the heart wrenching true story of a 1970 plane crash that killed most of the players of the Marshall University football team from West Virginia. Fox plays assistant coach Red Dawson, who chose to drive back on that fateful day, and prior to filming the movie the real life Dawson got on a plane after years of avoiding air travel to visit him in Hawaii. We sat down with Fox at a press roundtable where he discussed his relationship with Red, his experience hosting SNL, some parallels in his characters, and of course he answered a few questions about that other show. You know, the one with the island…and the stuff that happens?

We Are Marshall hits theaters December 22nd.

Was it difficult filming a movie about a plane crash based on a true story as opposed to the fictional crash in Lost?

I didn’t really do any of the actual crash sequences. I wasn’t in any of those because Red was driving, but yeah, there’s more of a weight and a responsibility to it when it’s a true story, certainly, for me, getting to know Red and becoming really good friends with him. Everything that I approach as an actor I feel an enormous responsibility even though it’s a purely fictional role to bring as much honesty and depth and truth as I can to it. But I think when it came to We Are Marshall, the fact that it’s a true story and my relationship with Red and how much I wanted him to feel good about the way that I portrayed him in the movie and the way that the movie deals with an event that is so incredibly important to that community, I think for everyone involved it takes on a bigger responsibility, and there’s a little bit more pressure on you, but it’s a good pressure. It’s the best kind of pressure to have, and I think that everybody really thrived on that.

Why do you think Red agreed to go to Hawaii, and would you have gone on with the project regardless of Red’s opinion of you?

I was already committed to the project. Yeah I imagine that this actor playing a real person who’s still alive in a true story is a relationship that’s probably gone awry in the past. I’m sure that there have been examples of that where the two people didn’t get along that well. They didn’t see eye to eye, or a situation where the real person didn’t wanna meet the actor or the actor didn’t wanna meet the real person. So I feel really great. I look at what’s happened for Red and I and the fact that we’ve made this movie that I feel really great about and he feels really great about and we are really good friends. And so it’s like it’s as good as I could have ever hoped for that relationship to have worked out. I think that him getting on that plane...that was not an easy thing for him to do, but I do think that that again is a tribute to how much he cares about how much this event means to him in his life and how much he cared about this movie turning out to be great. And I think that even though he was really not comfortable getting on a flight he was making a show of...I’ll more than meet you halfway, but I will go all the way to Hawaii, and that was a big thing for him.

Was that the first time he had flown since then?

I think he’d been on a couple of really short flights to Austin. He had some family there, and I think that he’d done that, but he’s never been comfortable. It’s been something that’s really been difficult for him to do, and he definitely had done everything he could to not fly for 35 years.

What changed Red’s mind to come back to coaching?

I really think that again, it was Red sort of being...feeling like it was his responsibility to make sure that if this team was going to be rebuilt...and they brought a coach from the outside that wasn’t connected to them, which was necessary. I think that was very necessary but at the same time Red felt that there needed to be somebody to sort of stand guard over that and to make sure it was done right, and that’s the way I feel about that was that he was sort of, 'alright I’ll give you a year and I’m gonna assistant coach underneath you.' And you remember that scene on top of the shed where he says, 'I think that’s a demotion there,' cause Red felt very capable of being a head coach he was an amazing student of the game he was an amazing player and was a very good coach and the players loved him, so I think that more than anything he was allowing himself to be sort of first lieutenant to Jack Lengyel to make sure that the thing got done right, and I liked that.

What was the reaction of the parents and the community in Huntington, W.V.?

I can only imagine...if I put myself in that community’s shoes and I find out that this event that is so important and…it is a fabric of that community, part of the fabric of it, find out that Warner Brothers is gonna come in and make some big studio movie out of this thing. If I put myself in those shoes, I would be very suspicious of them. And I think that the way that McG and Warner Brothers and Basil and the producers and Jamie Linden who wrote the script, the way everybody approached that community, I really feel like they put those suspicions and maybe the little bit of trepidation that was there aside very quickly. By the time I got there to start shooting, all I felt from the community was an enormous amount of support…I met a lot of people that they want to first tell you how they’re connected to the event, who they know or who their parents knew or however they were connected to it, and then they would wanna say, you know, do it right. Basically, make us proud, make this story that is so important to us, make it into a really great story and that was something we got a lot of as we were making it.

What was it like hosting Saturday Night Live, and do you have a lot of real life fan encounters like the elevator sketch?

Yeah, I had the best time hosting SNL. I totally understand why you would wanna do that 20 weeks out of the year. I laughed so much...it was the most fun that I’ve had performing, you know, ever. It was so much fun. It was such a rush, everybody at SNL was just absolutely amazing, the cast. I’m a big fan of the show, and I watch the show as much as I can, so I’m fans of all those guys and what they do is very very different from what I normally do. Sketch comedy is a very very different kind of thing, but I do find myself drawn to very very dramatic and sometimes intense material, and that’s what people know of me. And so I do know and anybody who’s close to me knows that I have also a really goofy and sort of a comedic side of myself and that was something that I wanted to show, so when I got the offer to do it I was really excited to jump in with both my feet, go in there and have a great week and have a lot of fun and I just laughed so much and I just had the best time. I can’t say enough about that experience.

The elevator sketch is something that does happen to me a lot. I played it in the sketch that it was getting on my nerves towards the end for a comedic effect, but I’m usually really really patient with how people approach me and ask questions and sort of and give their theories and feel compelled to sort of tell you where they want things to go. I’m very patient with that because I think it’s a tribute to what the show is, not just the quality of the show, but I have people tell me all the time the experience of Lost is not just the 43 minutes that you’re watching an episode, it’s what happens for the next 24 to 48 hours after that with your friends and people that you watch the show with, and then for a certain segment of the audience going online and entering chat rooms and discussing things and posting ideas. It takes on this whole life of its own, and that’s pretty special. That’s not something that has happened too many times in the history of television, and the bi-product of that is that sometimes I find myself in situations where people are pretty crazy about the stuff they wanna tell me about…how they feel about it.

Many of your characters are dealing major psychological or physical trauma. Why do you think you choose these roles?

I dunno…I don’t have any objectivity on how I end up doing the things that I do. People do. They sort of make parallels and objectively you looking at the choices that I make would have a better line on what themes might be...consistent. And I don’t really necessarily ever look at it that way. For me it’s just I don’t really know why I respond to certain things. I really feel like I’m drawn to stories of redemption…but all stories really in some way or another are stories of redemption. But I do really find myself attracted to that in particularly in the male characters that I end up playing. I want to always find the complexity and the flaws within them and play people that are attempting to redeem themselves in really intense circumstances. And also one of the things about Lost, I’m also drawn to themes that deal with the really big question of what is the true nature of the human species. When the chips are down and all is lost, do we tend towards compassion and hope and taking care of each other, or do we tend towards self preservation at all cost, and I knew the minute that I read the pilot of Lost that that was a show that could deal with those kind of things. Joseph Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness”, “Lord of the Flies”, those types of books have been books that have been very important in my life, and I knew that Lost was a premise that had the opportunity to deal with that, and here we are two and a half years later, and we’re clearly dealing with those types of things on the show which I really enjoy.

Is it difficult for you to shake off the internal emotion of your characters after the director yells “cut”?

For a long time, I’ve worked with actors that just sort of…‘action’ they’re on and ‘cut’ they’re off, and there have been times that I’ve really wanted to be that kind of actor but I’ve kinda given up on that. I definitely carry the stuff around with me. For a role like Red where I really lived in his skin for four months, there’s just a certain emotional weight and a wound that you have to try to find in there where you’re carrying that around all the time, and that’s not something that when you go home you just get rid of…for me it just takes a lot longer than that. So if you’re working non-stop you don’t ever really completely get out of it. But my wife, we have been together for so long, and she really understands that about me and understands that that’s just the way I have to do it. That’s part of the process for me. Sometimes it’s not the best scenario, but it’s the way that is right for me I guess.

What is the security like on the scripts for Lost, and how far in advance do tell you information about upcoming scenes?

There is a group of people out there that wanna spoil the show. They really do a lot and try a lot to get information on what’s going on in the show. Sometimes we will get scripts where there are scenes that are not included in the script. We have shot episodes of Lost where the only people that know what happened in that scene are the people that actually shot it. There was never any really script pages given out for it. The security’s pretty tight. Every script that’s handed out has your name printed on every single page of the script so if it gets out you take the responsibility for letting the script out. It’s a big part of the show...not having it be spoiled before its time for it to go on air. So they are pretty intense about that.

Has anybody ever come close to the theory?

Well I don’t know what it is. I have a feeling I know what it is. Every year I have a meeting with J.J. and Damon where basically they give me sort of what the broad theme of that year is going to be and how that relates to Jack and where Jack’s gonna start and where Jack’s gonna end up, and they give me some benchmarks along the year so I can have sort of an idea of like what the year’s going to be like. But as far as what the final conflict of Lost is…I don’t know.