Interview: Titus Welliver

Trying to write about Lost, now that it’s over, is like opening up love letters and looking at pictures taken on roller coasters and at tourist spots with your ex, like, two weeks after you broke up with them. I haven’t healed yet!

But getting to sit down with Titus Welliver — aka The Man In Black, aka the man without a name, aka the smoke monster, aka just an all around awesome dude — makes it easier. Titus, I think, is what the smoke monster would have been like if he got to keep his body and got to go home. He’s an open, funny, ready-to-roll type of character. Unlike Jacob, who was cryptic and happy to be quiet and take station alone in a foot, the smoke monster was ready to spew answers and seek them out, ready to mix and mingle with the island people — often to deadly results. But thankfully, Titus did not kill me during our interview, nor possess me afterward.

Mr. Welliver has all the artistic background and upbringing to be rightfully pretentious if he so chose. But the dude was happy to talk, for quite a while actually, and showed up in flip-flops, plaid shorts, and a Boston tee. We could have just bumped into each other on the beach. What Titus’s upbringing with artists, architects, and stage acting taught him, though, in terms of Lost, was to appreciate its metaphoric nature, its thematic nature that left literal answers up to sometimes perplexing interpretation. But for a guy that played something as nebulous as a smoke monster, Titus was totally into it. Thankfully, it’s more often than not that Titus gets to play engaging people, from his work on Deadwood to Sons of Anarchy, to being on the other side of the law in The Good Wife, to the upcoming heist drama film The Town, which has Titus playing cops and robbers with Jon Hamm and Ben Affleck. It turns out life is good for the smoke monster without the island after all.

Titus Welliver: Well, it’s done, and what’s done is done. It’s not coming back and there’s not going to be a movie, so there is that finality. But in all honesty, I miss playing that character. I miss the people — Mark Pellegrino in particular. I miss doing the gig.

Josh Moorhead: How did it feel to take on that kind of role in the series?

TW: It’s unlike any experience I’ve had before in my career — the acceptance with that kind of intensity in such a short period of time. There was one episode — I think it’s a 45-minute scene from the season finale last year — where they introduce the characters. The day after that aired, I was in my local Starbucks getting my coffee as I do all the time, and I was inundated by questions and people, and suddenly it had taken on a completely different life of its own. It was pretty staggering to me, I have to say. I’m not unaccustomed to having people come up and talk to me about my work, but this is a completely different experience.

JM: Was it flattering in a way?

TW: Yeah. Nobody has been intrusive or rude or…I mean, a lot of fans were, of course, very curious. The thing I found extreme was the time I did the first episode from the last season — I call it the Nestor Carbonnelle episode. Everywhere I went, over a six-month period on a weekly basis, I would say maybe five to ten times more people were stopping to ask me when I was going back to Lost and if I had any sense of who my character was and what his name was.

JM: Did it bother you that the character didn’t have a name?

TW: No, I thought it gave the character more reason to be so completely disenchanted with the world — the man with no name, the Man in Black. Without a name, he lacked a sense of identity. It was personal — there was no external identity, and it’s not necessarily an act-able thing whatsoever, but what an interesting sort of secret prop to have as an actor.

JM: You appreciate the cryptic nature as an actor?

TW: I do. I think it’s brutal for the fans, more than anything. If you just said Jerry, Fred…it didn’t matter. They just wanted something that was tactile. And God knows they extrapolated — it was Esau, Samuel…the endless Biblical references. And yet, even if I had known, I couldn’t reveal anything I knew, for obvious reasons. It was highly illegal, and most people didn’t want to know. They didn’t want it spoiled. They were far too invested.

JM: Is there anything about the character or story that we don’t know?

TW: The only thing you didn’t see were alternate takes of scenes. Two scenes that come to mind are the scene in which Mark Pellegrino and I are playing the game Senate and I tell him I’m going to leave the island, and I throw the knife and it sticks to the side of the well. We did many different variations of that. We played it a lot of different ways. I’m very happy with the way that Tucker Gates ultimately decided to cut that scene together, but there are other takes of that that are dramatically very different and, I think, every bit as interesting. Same with the scene I did with Allison Janney in the bottom of the well with the donkey wheel. We changed it up and, who knows, maybe they’ll include those [on the DVD]. That’s a lot of supplemental material to put on a DVD. I think it would be something that fans would eat up.

JM: Was the message the same?

TW: Yeah, the message was the same; delivery was different. There were takes of those scenes so charged with almost a kind of anger, an intensity that was very real, and it was one way to play it. I don’t think one was right and one was wrong — they were just very different. They all had merit. I particularly remember one scene with Allison Janney that was very hostile. When she first came in, I had an idea. Tucker [Gates] said, “I don’t know. Let’s just mix it up and see what happens.” This was an opportunity for him to vent and express all that had been withheld from her all that time, because you have to remember that’s the first time the Man in Black had seen mother since he left. It was interesting, and Allison went with it. And there were takes on her side where she was much more emotional, and takes where she was more confrontational, where it was really two powers banging up against each other. They were all interesting and they were a lot of fun to act. She’s a staggeringly gifted actor to work with, so it ain’t hard.

JM: Did you get to choose how to act the scenes?

TW: Oh certainly. It was one of those things where Tucker had complete trust with the choices we would make as actors and would kind of stay out of our way, for lack of a better word, and would corral it to a certain degree. It would vary, and we would have one where all bets were off.

JM: Did you identify the character as evil? Or how did you feel about it?

TW: I don’t think the character was evil at all. If you look at the history, with some exceptions, the destructive past created by the smoke monster, by the Man in Black…a lot of the time, when he would go after people, these were people whose intentions were not pure. It never really seemed that Smokey would indiscriminately or arbitrarily just attack blindly. He was a major force, but there was a method to that madness. But I would never assign that to a character I was playing, to say that he was either good or bad, ethically or morally. Those things are on the page. I think it’s bad to make a judgment on a character as an actor. Even if one is playing Adolf Hitler, who we know was an insane, very evil man, if you’re an actor approaching that role, you’re going to play him as a guy whose intention is to save the world, save the German people. It’s not about finding the good in a character, it’s about getting to the root of a character’s insanity. Find something that’s rooted and act-able because otherwise you end up with a sort of mustache-twirling, hand-wringing performance which…that’s great if you’re doing the villain on Scooby Doo, but I certainly don’t want to play that. I may have done that before, but I would say that, at this juncture in my life, that doesn’t interest me.

JM: So you didn’t think of the character himself as a bad person, looking back at him?

TW: I always thought of Smokey as being a real tragic hero, in a way. I mean, what a place to play from. Here’s a human being who doesn’t want any of this stuff he’s been handed. All he wants to do is go and find his people. He wants to go and live a normal life and he can’t. He’s being held a prisoner, and he just wants to escape. Where’s the evil in that? We all can understand, if someone has been wrongly convicted and incarcerated, that the driving force to become free under any circumstances and what one would do to obtain that freedom. I found that character really tragic — strong, but deeply tragic…but not evil.

JM: How much did you know about the character when you started playing him?

TW: Not so much — as much as I had a conversation with Elizabeth Sarnoff in the beginning. What she was able to tell me was this character is beyond what you can begin to understand, as far as the importance in the Lost universe. She started to tell me some stuff and I stopped her midway because I realized that none of the information she was giving me was going to be actable stuff that I could do. So I thought, “Let me find it on my own,” which is why I think, when you look at that first scene with Jacob and the Man in Black on the beach, it’s very clear what the relationship is there, but there is something also obtuse. You come away saying, “Okay, well, alright, one guy is in a cult, the other guy has a sort of never-ending hope for humanity, but what’s beneath that?”

JM: Did you talk to Terry [O'Quinn] about the role?

TW: No, we didn’t have a conversation until the finale party. What I thought was interesting — and this was brought to my attention by other people who were watching the show and who knew the whole Lost universe, and I talked to Liz Sarnoff about this briefly and there was nothing in the casting — is there was an odd similarity. When Terry ceased to be Locke and was the Man in Black, there was a really interesting shift in his interpretation of that character. I never really questioned Terry about that. All I said to him was, “Thanks for allowing me the use of your body for all those episodes.” And Terry is a guy who has tremendous weight as an actor. He doesn’t even have to speak. He has such an interesting face, and he does so much with just his eyes and stillness. But I definitely saw a difference in Locke and fake Locke — FLocke. I didn’t make that up. I can’t take credit for that. It would have been interesting, but in a way, I think it’s kind of cool that he arrived at his own interpretation of how that manifested itself.

JM: You had a really artistic upbringing, and you’ve done some Shakespeare. Would you describe Lost as Shakespearean? Or how would you describe it as an art-form?

TW: It has a little Shakespeare in it. The thing to remember about Shakespeare is those are stories that are timeless: good versus evil, love and hate and loss, and these are all the human experience. I think Damon [Lindeloff] and Carlton [Cuse] and Liz, and all those involved in Lost wanted to just tell a really good story, and they were able to cram all those great storytelling elements into a television series in six seasons, and you’re lucky if you can maintain that level of excellence in a season or two of something. They managed to pull it off. There are some naysayers who were Lost fans who said, “Well, by the third season I was feeling lit. Things were kind of flopping around.” If they flopped around for the fans, it wasn’t for very long because nobody left. They all admit that they stayed there. They might have felt confused or irritated, but they hung in. That’s why I think this show has real legs — if you can hold an audience for that long without it being something that’s like a procedural law drama or a cop show or a hospital show — they’re all soap operas. You have to redefine the soap opera. With Lost, it took the soap opera and made it sort of nonlinear in an interesting way, and that’s not easy to do and hold an audience. We exist in a society now where everything is kind of spelled out for you, so I think people’s attention spans are significantly smaller than they were at one time. That’s a big leap, to be able to do that.

JM: What does getting to be a part of something like that mean to your career?

TW: We’ll see what fruit comes off the tree from doing that. What I would not want to do, which I think does happen a lot of times when you play a character that is that iconic, is people tend to want you to repeat that, and I certainly wouldn’t want to do that because it would diminish the importance of what was already accomplished. I feel very blessed for being a part of something that I think will really stand the test of time. I think Lost will continue to find new audiences generation after generation after generation, and in that way, it’ll be fun to watch when I’m 80 years old — some ten-year-old coming over and saying, “You’re the Man in Black?” “I was.”

JM: “Do you have any idea how much I want to kill you?”

TW: Yeah, I do get that. People do say that to me on the street sometimes. They’ll say, “Just give me the line,” which has become the line, which at first I’d say, “No, I don’t really know what you’re talking about. I had a lot of lines. Which one do you want me to say?” and then realize that it’s really embarrassing.

JM: What are you working on now?

TW: I’m back in my second season of Sons of Anarchy, and that’s not for the faint of heart. This season, half of the show is in Charming, California and half of it’s in Belfast, Ireland, which is where my character is. So I’ve just finished my second episode of that. That’s going to be quite a ride. And then we start Good Wife back up probably in mid-July.

JM: Where do you see yourself going career-wise?

TW: I have a pilot that I’ve created and written, so now is the time to get out there and get out with that.

JM: Can you tell us about it?

TW: I can’t really. I would love to, but I can’t until it becomes a reality as far as becoming a production of something, then I’d be more than happy to talk about it, but I can’t — not just for superstitious reasons.

JM: Is it just called “The Show with No Name?”

TW: No, it’s not the show with no name and it has nothing to do with being stranded on an island…

JM: Is it a comedy?

TW: No, certainly not. There will be humor in it, but it’s pretty dark. It’s very grounded in reality. Just wait and see — you won’t be disappointed.

JM: Have you thought about comedy?

TW: Yeah, but the biggest problem is that the nature of the characters I play, by and large, are all very serious, so I recently had a meeting for a film that is being produced by Judd Apatow and it was a crazy, off-the-wall character. I think it was so completely out of character that it actually made people nervous in the room. They looked like I had thrown bleach on their clothing or something. It’s not that it went poorly and I had to comment on it — it was the 800-pound gorilla in the room, which is to say, “I know you have no idea why I’m here in the room,” but certainly they were laughing, and that’s what they’re supposed to do. That’s the thing about being pigeonholed. That’s okay. There will be plenty of opportunities. The right thing will come along, and when it does, that’ll be great. In the meantime, I’m more than happy to oblige myself and oblige people that I go to work with by playing those characters. I enjoy playing the characters that have weight to them. I would say that there are moments of levity in The Town, but that character is certainly not a comedic character. It’s a very serious, dramatic film. John Hamm’s character and my character…there’s a little bit of light-aired ballbreaking that occurs between the two characters, but I’d say that’s the extent of it. The rest of it is very cold, serious crime drama in pursuit of getting these really bad bankrobber guys.

JM: My mom wanted me to ask you what you’ve got against mothers.

TW: I have nothing against mothers. I love my mom. My mom is responsible for me realizing what it is I always wanted to do, which is to be an actor. Both of my parents were extremely supportive. They were both artists, but I didn’t grow up in the circus or anything like that. The logical leap for me was to become a painter, which I certainly pursued briefly as a young man and have rediscovered that 25 years later, but I knew I wanted to be an actor, and I told my parents that was what I was going to do. My mother was actually the first person who took me to an acting school in Boston and signed me up for a summer program, so I embrace the mother.