Watching Lost

The A.V. Club: Darth Vader and the Joker were two of the bigger names that Entertainment Weekly’s readers put higher on the villains list than your character. Do you want to talk any shit about Darth Vader?

Michael Emerson: [Laughs.] He’s a great force of darkness, I guess, but how much acting goes on behind a plastic head? I’m not sure about it. [Laughs.] It seems like his costume does more work for him than mine does for me. I should get handicap points, I think.

AVC: Your character isn’t necessarily a straight-up villain; he’s sometimes portrayed as having the best of intentions. Why do you think Benjamin Linus has been so easily labeled as a villain?

ME: I don’t know. I’m happy to live with it, but I think it’s interesting that I make these best-villain lists when it’s not even clear that I am a bad guy. I think it’s something in the playing of the part. I think it worries people when they can’t get a handle on a character. I tend to play him kind of ambiguously. There is a sinister quality to him, but I think the verdict is still out about what his position is on the scale of good and evil. To a large extent, people’s interest in the character is the mystery of the character.

AVC: Because there are no clear-cut heroes and villains, it’s interesting to watch people discuss the show and say, “Obviously this person is good and this person is evil.” In the end, Hurley will probably wind up being the major villain, because nobody will see it coming.

ME: [Laughs.] Yeah, because that’ll come out of left field. That would be the last thing anyone was expecting. I’m going to make a broad statement here and say that I think people respond to villains because people in general are more villainous than heroic. I think it speaks to the human condition. I think we all secretly understand that we have our sins and our dark thoughts, but we put a face on it for the world. When we see villains played, we sort of perk up. We go, “How’s he doing?” [Laughs.]

AVC: When it comes to what’s going to happen next on the show, the cast is largely kept in the dark, getting scripts just before shooting begins. At what point did you realize that Benjamin Linus was going to be an integral part of the story?

ME: That really dawned on me gradually. As you know, I was originally engaged to be a guest player, to do a few episodes and go away, so I wasn’t thinking in terms of staying in Hawaii. The scenes I was in in the early going, when I was Henry Gale, they had a kind of ambiguity about them. There was a mystery in there, and no one could really figure it out. I remember one day, a director came to me—I had a line, Sayid was waving a gun in my face saying, “Tell us who your leader is,” and I said, “If I tell you, he’ll kill me,” and the director came and said, “That’s good. Let’s take it again, and this time, act as if the leader is the scariest person on Earth.” And I said, “Okay, I can do that, but what if the leader is me?” And he blinked at me a couple of times and said, “I can’t discuss that.” [Laughs.] And that was it. From then on, I thought, “Oh, I see. This could turn into something.” I’m like a slower factor on those kinds of issues; if even I can see that that’s a possibility, then it must be in there somewhere. And as it turns out, it was true. It was a great development.

AVC: Tell the truth, you were getting online and posting anonymously, “Who is this Ben Linus guy? He’s great! They should give him more screen time.”

ME: I wish I had the savvy to do that. I don’t go online much, and of course I don’t even have the sense to have an e-mail name that isn’t my own name, so I can never do any of that stuff anonymously. I’m hopeless.

The complete interview is here.