Interview: Mark Pellegrino

It was as fantastic and confusing as Lost ritualistically served us for those sweet six years it spent rocking our socks into oblivion…except this time it was real. I asked Mark Pellegrino what he thought Lost meant, and he seemed flabbergasted. “I dunno! What do you think?” Me? Jacob wants to know what I think about the island?!?!?!

And then I remembered that Jacob is sadly fake and Mark Pellegrino is real, and somehow, so is this moment. I got to interview Mark Pellegrino. And turns out he’s just a normal guy and, when it comes to Lost, as normal a viewer as the rest of us, trying to piece together the mystery and meaning. But talking to Mark is cool for much more besides Lost. The guy had the pleasure of giving The Dude a swirly in The Big Lebowski. When he wasn’t playing a Christlike character (as Mark admitted) on Lost, he was kicking it as lord of the underworld Lucifer in Supernatural, not to mention a series of other credits, including an upcoming indie on its way to Sundance, Joint Body, where Mark plays – gasp! – a very real human being…which, it turns out, is what Mark is. He came in sweating from karate and was quick with the quips when I tried to conquer my nerves with bad jokes. Engaging and a bit zen, playful but with a bit of a dark side (his preference for “bad guy” characters), Mark was a bit like his island alter-ego that, except for that “what does it all mean?” question, he had answers…including to the most important question of all for me.

In the mid-season episode, “The Lighthouse,” Jack scurries up to, well, a lighthouse where he finds a series of names inscribed around a dial. These names are all candidates to take Jacob’s place as island caretaker. When the dials rotated to one of these names, Jacob could peek in on their lives. Jack’s last name, “Shephard,” was on there, and so was mine, “Moorhead,” right above Jack. So I had to know — why didn’t I get to rule island-land? Mark laughed when I told him my name. “No one with that last name could be taken seriously. We couldn’t have someone with that name running the island.” Touche. I’m just glad I asked at the end of the interview.

Josh Moorhead: How are things now that Lost is done?

Mark Pellegrino: It’s been so sad in some ways. I’m sad that it’s over because I just started to fall in love with everybody there, but great in another way because people recognize me from the show and I feel like I’ve made a whole new family of fans outside of the cast, so it’s been really nice. It doesn’t hurt to be Jacob because that means a little bit of work security down the road.

JM: Were you a fan of the show before you got involved?

MP: Not really in that I’d never really watched it before. I read the pilot when it was in treatment and I went up for one of the characters. I don’t even remember the name of the character at the time, but the pilot was amazing, the script was amazing, and then I kind of lost track of it because I was on other projects, and I never watched it. Didn’t even own a television set until about three years ago. My wife made me get a TV. How much was I told about the character when I was auditioning? Nothing. In fact, I was auditioning for a character named Jason, and we all know that the Man in Black does not have a name, and it was a scene vaguely reminiscent of our beach scene but not quite that, and my wife would see the show often, and up until that point thought that I might be this character Jacob. It was confirmed when I got on the island, but only when I got on the island.

JM: I was told you are a spiritual person. Has the show had any influence on that?

MP: You were told that I was a spiritual person? Who told you that? Well, it definitely made me think of the nature of good and evil, because on the show, the lines that separate the two are very blurry and a little porous, and there’s a lot of crossover, and I like that. It’s complex and interesting. It messed with my ideas of a messianic figure. You always think of a messianic figure as coming out of the womb, a messianic figure as never having to travel from point A to point B and starting out completely differently from where they end up. It was a nice education in the development of an angelic and savior type figure and the nature of good and bad, good and evil.

JM: Were you satisfied with your character and how much you learned about Jacob?

MP: I was. I only say that tentatively because… I’m not a writer so I have to qualify this, but I thought there was quite a bit of exposition, and I tend not to like that exposition thing. I like a lot of action and acting. It was necessary information, but I hate to be the deliverer of a lot of information. But the arc was pretty amazing, starting from an innocent, really naïve guy to somebody who is looking for redemption like everybody else who comes to the island, but just with a lot more knowledge and serenity, and I think you should gain that after being alive for almost 2,000 years.

JM: As an actor, how do you deal with the cryptic nature that Lost has?

MP: You just deal on a scene-by-scene basis — what’s going on in the scene and what you’re doing on a human level, and every once in awhile, if you’re lucky enough to work with Jack Bender, one of the executive producers, he’ll give you a little hint that seems to lead you in the direction that you’re hoping you’re going. And the hint will be something like, “Oh yeah, Jesus the carpenter, that’s kind of the direction it’s in,” or, “It’s really important that they understand this because you really need him to understand this.” Little generalities like that kind of let you know you’re going in the right direction. It all works out in the long shot.

JM: Were they telling you to play it like Jesus?

MP: Yeah, that’s the message I was getting. Not the Jesus of John, the Book of John, this otherworldly figure of Jesus of Nazareth, but more like Jesus the carpenter. The man amongst the people who just knows a little more than everybody around him. That’s the gist that I got.

JM: What do you know about the Jacob character that the audience didn’t get to find out?

MP: I think it was all put on the page, all put out there — everybody knows everything there is to know about Jacob, as far as I’m concerned.

JM: Were you satisfied with the series finale?

MP: I loved it. I cried like a baby through about 85% of it. Every time one of the characters would touch another one and have the flashback and fall in love again, I’d break down like a baby. The whole thing was really moving to me.

JM: Coming to the series as late as you did, did you feel accepted by everybody?

MP: Totally. I’ve been fortunate. I haven’t come onto a show yet where I’ve met assholes. Everybody has been really nice to me, especially on that show. They folded me into the group really nicely.

JM: Is it cool for you to have people saying, “Jacob, pee on my rug”? Maybe I should rephrase that…

MP: It’s nice to be recognized and it’s nice to have people enjoy what I’m doing. It’s nice to get that reflection because, as an actor, you work for a long time in relative, and having that sounding board is really special. So far it’s been special, having a good experience.

JM: Between playing characters like Jacob and Lucifer in Supernatural, what do you prefer?

MP: I prefer the bad guys, even though I don’t really think any character I play is bad. I play everybody as a good character, even Lucifer or Paul from Dexter. I let the audience judge whether or not the character is bad because I have to get behind whatever it is I’m doing. I have to believe what I’m doing and be morally justified in my actions, so everyone is good as far as I’m concerned, even Lucifer. But Lucifer has a lot more fun — not looking for redemption in the way that Jacob was, trying to correct a mistake — he’s going out for revenge, single-mindedly pursuing that end.

JM: Were you trying to work in some of that subtext of being an evil character?

MP: No, but there are moments where I can see when Nester is talking to me and other characters are talking to me, that in that moment of reflection, where I’m playing the game in my own mind with the Man in Black, a lot of those moments can be taken as, “Oh, that’s interesting. I think there’s something going on here,” which there is. I’m actually thinking about this chess match — this game my brother and I play where we’re kind of doing this with each other. But I can see how it would come out as perhaps suggestive of something dark.

JM: Can you tell us more about this game you were playing together — your struggle?

MP: At a certain point, it’s him trying to kill me. What do I make of that game? It is the battle between good and evil, essentially, and it seemed to me that the moral lines were drawn. I don’t know if I’m right about this at all, but it did seem like Marley, the good guy, was the guy who sacrificed and gave up something for others, and the bad guys kind of pursued their own interests and had that Jedi knight kind of feel. The right side of the force, the dark side of the force. I don’t even know if anything I’m going to say is going to make any sense right now. The game was suggested as that kind of moral conflict between the two of us, and then when I do what I do to him because of what he does to our mother, it becomes about attempting to redeem myself before he gets to me. Does that make sense? You look puzzled. You look like, “This doesn’t comport at all with what I’ve been thinking in the last six years.”

JM: I was satisfied with the finale. I feel like I spend some time defending it.

MP: You were finale-satisfied? I find myself defending it too. I know some of the story-lines enough to see how they were tied up and where they were. It all kind of made sense to me even not knowing the entire mythology.

JM: You feel like you understand the series as much as you can?

MP: I think so. What do you think? What do you think the island was?

JM: I think it’s whatever you said it was in the show. It’s that metaphor — the wine bottle, holding in malevolence and all that.

MP: And everything that happens on the island is real.

JM: What do you feel the legacy of Lost will be?

MP: Really damn good TV. I think they pressed a lot of boundaries and they mixed a lot of genres in a way that television won’t necessarily be the same again. After you see something that is a sci-fi, a mystery, a drama, a romantic action-adventure all kind of combined into one that involves people so intimately, how can you turn back from there? It’s raising the bar to me.

JM: What does this mean to your career?

MP: That’s yet to be seen, but I think gone are the days when you work in a television show and people just remember you as that character, and that just killed your career for 30 years. Now it’s the potential stepping stone to other things and playing roles that seemed, on the surface, to be so different than Jacob and Lucifer. For a lot of people, there’s a huge chasm in the middle of that which means range, and maybe that could mean possible good things for the future of my career.

JM: Do you want to move into movies more?

MP: I wouldn’t mind doing a little more features. I love horror movies. I’d love to do a good horror movie.

JM: What kind of movie is Joint Body?

MP: Joint Body is one of those little indie films that is trying to get into Sundance. They’re trying to edit it fast enough to get it into Sundance. It’s about a guy who gets out of prison and tries to restart his life but comes up against a number of obstacles and takes an entirely different direction.

JM: So it’s a darker project and character for you than Lost?

MP: It’s not that I want to get away from that, because I think there was enough gray in that, I can’t even consider that white. I actually did that project (Joint Body) because I worked with that director in the past and he’s a friend of mine, so there were more personal reasons, and I kind of like the odyssey the guy goes on. It’s a real journey for the character — it starts in one place and ends up in another, and I like when there’s a nice little arc for the character.

JM: What was your favorite Jacob moment?

MP: I like a lot of the very last episode that I did where I got to be with everybody in the cast and I got to spill all the beans to them and give them the map — the template they had to follow, to carry the torch, so to speak. And I really liked the connection between Jack and me. I really liked those moments. Everyone was so generous and so nice on my takes, giving everything they have that it was just a really nice experience with the people all around.

JM: What was it like on set toward the end of filming?

MP: You didn’t quite know it at the time. Nobody was sad or depressed, or overly elated or happy to be moving on. They were just plodding along, doing their work. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at the very end because the end was so emotional that I can’t help but think a lot of that emotion was in part because their six-year affair was ending.