Post by Forever Xena on Nov 28, 2005 3:23:58 GMT -6
The Sunday Times - Scotland
November 27, 2005
You've made it when you get Lost
With his role in the desert-island television drama that is gripping audiences, Henry Ian Cusick has found a ticket to global recognition, writes Claire Prentice
Henry Ian Cusick is experiencing a big-in-Japan moment. Just weeks ago, the actor couldn’t leave his LA apartment without being mobbed by squealing fans, but back home in Britain nobody has a clue who he is.
All that will change next year, when the second series of Lost, the hit American desert-island drama, is aired in the UK. Cusick joins the cast at the start of series two (currently airing in America), playing Desmond, an enigmatic Scot who appears to have been hiding out on the island since before the plane crashed, leaving 48 telegenic survivors stranded.
His star status will be further enhanced next year with a big screen appearance opposite Demi Moore in the film Half Light.
“It’s strange,” reflects the half-Scots, half-Peruvian actor, sitting in the living room of his Kent home, surrounded by books and videos as well as children’s toys, a punchbag and an accordion. “One minute people are coming up to you at the supermarket checkout and the next you are back home and it is as if it never happened.”
Home is a three-bedroom house in Shipbourne, a village located between Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells. It has a church, a school and one pub. The only time Cusick makes the 40-minute journey to London is for auditions.
The 36-year-old actor seems bewildered by the sudden upturn in his career. Back in August he was spending a quiet day at home when he got a call out of the blue from his agent in LA asking him to audition for an American television series he had never seen.
He obliged and within a week was sitting on a plane to Hawaii, a newly signed member of the cast of the Emmy-award-winning show. “There are so many strands to Lost and so many characters and I think that’s what makes it so appealing. It is about faith, religion, action, sci-fi, soap, a plane crash — it’s not just a cop show or a medical show, so it appeals to everyone,” he says in an accent that owes more to the 18 years he spent in Scotland than to his childhood in Trinidad and Tobago, Peru and Spain.
Cusick is reluctant to say anything about his character, Desmond, for fear of spoiling this series for viewers and he won’t be drawn on the rumours that he is one of the bad guys. In a plot twist it emerges that Desmond has already had a past encounter with one of the crash survivors, who play out their own intense personal dramas while the rest of the world is oblivious to their existence.
From the outset the producers of Lost had their eye fixed on the slot occupied by Sex and the City and then Desperate Housewives as the show everyone was talking about. The first episode cost $12m to create, making it the most expensive pilot in television history. Series one reached an impressive audience of 20m in America.
Originally intended as a one-off series, the programme’s popularity forced the producers to get to work immediately on a second series. “Everyone keeps telling me how exciting it is and I’m delighted to have got the role, it’s an incredible thing to be part of. But it doesn’t feel real because my life really hasn’t changed that much,” he says.
Channel 4 might not take series two, he argues, and nobody in Britain might ever know the name Henry Ian Cusick. Given that Channel 4 spent an unprecedented £1m marketing Lost and that 6.4m viewers tune in every week, this seems extremely unlikely.
Cusick, though, is superstitious. Keen to emphasise the normality of his existence, he lists his engagements for this afternoon — collecting his three sons from school and taking them to karate, going to the supermarket and getting dinner ready for when his wife, Annie Wood, comes home.
“My whole life is very relaxed,” says the actor. “My wife works full time, so when I don’t have a job on I’m at home with the kids. It works pretty well.”
Fame seems unlikely to go to his head, but if it threatens to, he can rely on his family to keep his feet firmly on the ground. While his eldest son, Elias, 11, is proud of his appearance in Lost, his wife hasn’t watched the tapes yet and his youngest children, Lucas, 7, and Esau, 5, were so bored that Cusick was forced to switch it off.
The family left Glasgow four years ago so that he and Wood could pursue their careers. Wood is artistic director of the Polka Theatre in Wimbledon and Cusick has been in demand at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre and the Almeida.
His television credits include Taggart, 2,000 Acres of Sky, The Book Group, Waking the Dead and Midsomer Murders.
Prior to Lost he was best known in North America as Jesus Christ, following the 2003 release of The Gospel of John, a word-for-word dramatisation. It was funded by a religious group as an educational tool and screened in Canada and America, where Cusick’s performance was widely praised by critics.
“It was a massive task as I had to learn all of the gospel and get it absolutely word perfect. Because of the size of that it meant that I didn’t have time to worry about anything else, I just got on with doing it,” he says. What did his mother, a devout Catholic, make of her son portraying Jesus? “I think my family thought it was pretty cool.”
Since fixing his sights on America, he has landed roles in Pleasantville director Robert Degus’s latest indie film, Nine/Tenths, with Dave Ortiz and Gabrielle Anwar, and the romantic thriller Half Light with Demi Moore.
Moore plays a successful novelist who moves to a small Scottish village to help her get over the death of her son. Cusick, who plays her husband, is typically self-deprecating: “We filmed it in Wales so it wasn’t exactly a Hollywood blockbuster. The weather was so bad that we had to film my scene in the studio. It was meant to be on a beach beside a lighthouse.”
He got on famously with Moore, who bought 20 crates of beer for the crew and got them delivered to the island of Llanddwyn, Anglesey, where they were filming, so that they could all get drunk after a particularly tough week. “Demi was very sharp, much more than people give her credit for. She was self-effacing and humble, not at all starry.”
The son of a Scottish father and Peruvian mother, Cusick’s Andean-high cheekbones and dark rugged good looks seemed destined for the big screen. He moved to Newton Mearns with his family when he was 14 and, after dropping out of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, he began hanging around the Citizens’ theatre. His big break came as an understudy playing a polar bear in the panto.
It was the start of a long professional relationship with the Citz, where he appeared as Dorian Gray in The Picture of Dorian Gray with Rupert Everett, as Horner in The Country Wife and as Hamlet in The Marovitz Hamlet with Helen Baxendale. It was at the Citz that he met his wife, who was then assistant director at Tag theatre company.
He was also part of the Theatre Babel team, which toured Scotland and made numerous appearances at the Edinburgh festival.
Although he loves Scotland and regularly comes back to visit his mother and sister in Glasgow and his wife’s family in Islay, he is unlikely to move back. “I love Scotland, but the weather is too bad for me to ever want to live there again,” he says.
LA is more appealing, if the right part comes up. “It would have to be something really worthwhile to justify us moving to LA, but Annie and I have spoken and she would be up for it. I love the lifestyle there. I grew up in Trinidad and I really like warm weather. There’s a lot going for LA — you’re right by the beach and there’s the desert and the mountains close by.
“Anything seems possible when you are there. It just seems like anyone can get the break. You don’t have to serve your time in the same way you do in the UK.”
Keen to capitalise on the kudos Lost has given him stateside, he plans to return to LA in January for the pilot season. The hit rate is low and the atmosphere is famously bitchy, but Cusick enjoys it enormously, hanging out with a British actor friend and treating it like a holiday.
How would he react if he found himself stranded on a desert island with a bunch of strangers and a mysterious monster? “I’ve no idea, I’d probably be awful. I was in the Scouts as a boy, but I was always terrible at pitching the tent and all that practical stuff. I just wanted to play football and jump in the river. If it was just lying on a beach, though, I could do that.”
November 27, 2005
You've made it when you get Lost
With his role in the desert-island television drama that is gripping audiences, Henry Ian Cusick has found a ticket to global recognition, writes Claire Prentice
Henry Ian Cusick is experiencing a big-in-Japan moment. Just weeks ago, the actor couldn’t leave his LA apartment without being mobbed by squealing fans, but back home in Britain nobody has a clue who he is.
All that will change next year, when the second series of Lost, the hit American desert-island drama, is aired in the UK. Cusick joins the cast at the start of series two (currently airing in America), playing Desmond, an enigmatic Scot who appears to have been hiding out on the island since before the plane crashed, leaving 48 telegenic survivors stranded.
His star status will be further enhanced next year with a big screen appearance opposite Demi Moore in the film Half Light.
“It’s strange,” reflects the half-Scots, half-Peruvian actor, sitting in the living room of his Kent home, surrounded by books and videos as well as children’s toys, a punchbag and an accordion. “One minute people are coming up to you at the supermarket checkout and the next you are back home and it is as if it never happened.”
Home is a three-bedroom house in Shipbourne, a village located between Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells. It has a church, a school and one pub. The only time Cusick makes the 40-minute journey to London is for auditions.
The 36-year-old actor seems bewildered by the sudden upturn in his career. Back in August he was spending a quiet day at home when he got a call out of the blue from his agent in LA asking him to audition for an American television series he had never seen.
He obliged and within a week was sitting on a plane to Hawaii, a newly signed member of the cast of the Emmy-award-winning show. “There are so many strands to Lost and so many characters and I think that’s what makes it so appealing. It is about faith, religion, action, sci-fi, soap, a plane crash — it’s not just a cop show or a medical show, so it appeals to everyone,” he says in an accent that owes more to the 18 years he spent in Scotland than to his childhood in Trinidad and Tobago, Peru and Spain.
Cusick is reluctant to say anything about his character, Desmond, for fear of spoiling this series for viewers and he won’t be drawn on the rumours that he is one of the bad guys. In a plot twist it emerges that Desmond has already had a past encounter with one of the crash survivors, who play out their own intense personal dramas while the rest of the world is oblivious to their existence.
From the outset the producers of Lost had their eye fixed on the slot occupied by Sex and the City and then Desperate Housewives as the show everyone was talking about. The first episode cost $12m to create, making it the most expensive pilot in television history. Series one reached an impressive audience of 20m in America.
Originally intended as a one-off series, the programme’s popularity forced the producers to get to work immediately on a second series. “Everyone keeps telling me how exciting it is and I’m delighted to have got the role, it’s an incredible thing to be part of. But it doesn’t feel real because my life really hasn’t changed that much,” he says.
Channel 4 might not take series two, he argues, and nobody in Britain might ever know the name Henry Ian Cusick. Given that Channel 4 spent an unprecedented £1m marketing Lost and that 6.4m viewers tune in every week, this seems extremely unlikely.
Cusick, though, is superstitious. Keen to emphasise the normality of his existence, he lists his engagements for this afternoon — collecting his three sons from school and taking them to karate, going to the supermarket and getting dinner ready for when his wife, Annie Wood, comes home.
“My whole life is very relaxed,” says the actor. “My wife works full time, so when I don’t have a job on I’m at home with the kids. It works pretty well.”
Fame seems unlikely to go to his head, but if it threatens to, he can rely on his family to keep his feet firmly on the ground. While his eldest son, Elias, 11, is proud of his appearance in Lost, his wife hasn’t watched the tapes yet and his youngest children, Lucas, 7, and Esau, 5, were so bored that Cusick was forced to switch it off.
The family left Glasgow four years ago so that he and Wood could pursue their careers. Wood is artistic director of the Polka Theatre in Wimbledon and Cusick has been in demand at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre and the Almeida.
His television credits include Taggart, 2,000 Acres of Sky, The Book Group, Waking the Dead and Midsomer Murders.
Prior to Lost he was best known in North America as Jesus Christ, following the 2003 release of The Gospel of John, a word-for-word dramatisation. It was funded by a religious group as an educational tool and screened in Canada and America, where Cusick’s performance was widely praised by critics.
“It was a massive task as I had to learn all of the gospel and get it absolutely word perfect. Because of the size of that it meant that I didn’t have time to worry about anything else, I just got on with doing it,” he says. What did his mother, a devout Catholic, make of her son portraying Jesus? “I think my family thought it was pretty cool.”
Since fixing his sights on America, he has landed roles in Pleasantville director Robert Degus’s latest indie film, Nine/Tenths, with Dave Ortiz and Gabrielle Anwar, and the romantic thriller Half Light with Demi Moore.
Moore plays a successful novelist who moves to a small Scottish village to help her get over the death of her son. Cusick, who plays her husband, is typically self-deprecating: “We filmed it in Wales so it wasn’t exactly a Hollywood blockbuster. The weather was so bad that we had to film my scene in the studio. It was meant to be on a beach beside a lighthouse.”
He got on famously with Moore, who bought 20 crates of beer for the crew and got them delivered to the island of Llanddwyn, Anglesey, where they were filming, so that they could all get drunk after a particularly tough week. “Demi was very sharp, much more than people give her credit for. She was self-effacing and humble, not at all starry.”
The son of a Scottish father and Peruvian mother, Cusick’s Andean-high cheekbones and dark rugged good looks seemed destined for the big screen. He moved to Newton Mearns with his family when he was 14 and, after dropping out of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, he began hanging around the Citizens’ theatre. His big break came as an understudy playing a polar bear in the panto.
It was the start of a long professional relationship with the Citz, where he appeared as Dorian Gray in The Picture of Dorian Gray with Rupert Everett, as Horner in The Country Wife and as Hamlet in The Marovitz Hamlet with Helen Baxendale. It was at the Citz that he met his wife, who was then assistant director at Tag theatre company.
He was also part of the Theatre Babel team, which toured Scotland and made numerous appearances at the Edinburgh festival.
Although he loves Scotland and regularly comes back to visit his mother and sister in Glasgow and his wife’s family in Islay, he is unlikely to move back. “I love Scotland, but the weather is too bad for me to ever want to live there again,” he says.
LA is more appealing, if the right part comes up. “It would have to be something really worthwhile to justify us moving to LA, but Annie and I have spoken and she would be up for it. I love the lifestyle there. I grew up in Trinidad and I really like warm weather. There’s a lot going for LA — you’re right by the beach and there’s the desert and the mountains close by.
“Anything seems possible when you are there. It just seems like anyone can get the break. You don’t have to serve your time in the same way you do in the UK.”
Keen to capitalise on the kudos Lost has given him stateside, he plans to return to LA in January for the pilot season. The hit rate is low and the atmosphere is famously bitchy, but Cusick enjoys it enormously, hanging out with a British actor friend and treating it like a holiday.
How would he react if he found himself stranded on a desert island with a bunch of strangers and a mysterious monster? “I’ve no idea, I’d probably be awful. I was in the Scouts as a boy, but I was always terrible at pitching the tent and all that practical stuff. I just wanted to play football and jump in the river. If it was just lying on a beach, though, I could do that.”
Lost-media.com