[IMG:L]Fans of Naveen Andrews’ tortured torturer Sayid Jarrah may have wondered if the title Lost applied directly to him in the third season, when Andrews and several other original castmembers received precious little screen time early on in favor of a plotline focusing on The Others. But Andrews has been found again on the big screen in Grindhouse, jumping into director Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror as a wild-eyed scientist who has a lot of balls – literally.
Hollywood.com: We’re guessing Grindhouse was a completely different experience from Lost.
Naveen Andrews: Completely different. Also, [Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez] are like outlaws. They’re outside the studio system and it seems like no one saw a producer. There were no producers for miles, not even Bob or Harvey [Weinstein]…We didn’t actually have a script. I met Robert and it was just the scene with the castration in it and so of course I was intrigued: “Can you tell me more?” So when we get there we get the script, I have never done anything like this before and I’ll probably never do anything like it again.
HW: Did you say yes to the film immediately?
NA: Christ, it was an immediate yes. I knew nothing about this genre of filmmaking and if anyone did it would be those two because they know their shit and as highly ambitious as it seemed, if anyone could pull it off it would be them. I’m from England and it’s honor to work with people like this.
[IMG:R]HW: Did you see these kinds of movies growing up?
NA: Fortunately, no. What we did have was The Hammer House of Horror which was like really cheap, repressed English, sort of like Peter Cushing trying to kill a giant moth. Women with their tits out which to a 9-year-old, 10-year-old added some kind of excitement to your otherwise dull and boring life … So I had to be subjected to an indoctrination and reeducation at [Robert’s] house. We had to watch these films, which I thought were dreadful, just dreadful … I would look around and see Quentin and Robert laughing like maniacs and I found it funny for about two minutes. I was embarrassed. I thought, “What am I not getting here? They obviously see some kind of aesthetic here, and I can’t see it.” I’m still at a loss as to what the aesthetic actually is. I think that it has something to do with an obscene kind of humor.
HW: Does your son want to see them? And is he old enough to see them?
NA: Yes … I think about my 15-year-old son, and when he sees them he’s going to be seeing them in a very different way because he doesn’t have any references to the 1970s. I consider myself one of the last of the Baby Boomers. I was born in 1969 and the culture that we venerated and respected was the culture of the 1960s, both in film and in music, and so he’s going to look at it completely differently, and that’s where they might be creating new territory and new ground.
HW: Your character has a collecting hobby I don’t think we’ve seen on screen before.
NA: I’m a fan of balls now, and I had to be during the filming. You’re collecting things, really. I thought it was quite innocent. Children collect marbles and display them in glass jars and this is the natural progression to that, adults collecting body parts for the edification and delight of the general public.
HW: J.J. Abrams is promising a bigger ending this year on Lost than last year. Have you seen anything?
NA: It’s like magicians, isn’t it? “For my next trick …” I hope so. Bigger and better, that would be nice.
HW: You haven’t seen the finale script yet?
NA: Absolutely not, no. That’s like years ahead in the way we think about it … Sometimes [I get the script] the day before.
HW: The third season is starting to balance out between the original crash survivors and The Others. Were you starting to get frustrated at all?
NA: It’s nice to be featured. Yeah … for the original cast, I think that we have to be relatively stoic about the experience. There will always be that first season that we did. That will always be there and I’m very proud of it and I have it out there with the work that I’m the most proud of and they can never take that away. They’re the writers and we’re not. I couldn’t presume to write this show and it’s tough to be a writer and whatever direction they chose to take the show in they will.
HW: Do you anticipate a run where they might feature your character for six episodes straight?
NA: I honestly don’t know. I mean, it would be nice. Of course it would, but I have no idea what they’re going to do and we didn’t from the beginning. It was almost Stalin’s Polit Bureau. There was information and disinformation. They kept their cards very close to their chest. It’s strange. It’s a strange experience, and also doing TV, this is my first series. Not to sound like I’m moaning or whining, but it’s very grueling. It’s hard work.
HW: How did the cast react when they heard producers were planning to definitively end the series?
NA: Oh, manna from heaven. One thing that I’ve learned from England with The Office and stuff that I’ve done with the BBC, to keep the quality up there has to be a limited number of episodes. It can’t be about making money for syndication. We want the quality to maintain itself and if the writers have a definite end, a conclusion to work towards that can only be a good thing.
