Ask and ye shall receive:
Burly Hurley of 'Lost' Gets Cryptic
(Tuesday, January 04 04:00 PM)
By Daniel Fienberg
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) The plucky survivors of ABC's "Lost" could serve as a casebook for how most people would respond to being stranded on a deserted (and mysterious) island. Some folks would be as handy and altruistic as Matthew Fox's Jack or as malevolently resourceful as Josh Holloway's Sawyer. Few of us would show the eerie mastery of Terry O'Quinn's Locke, but the reluctant brattiness of Maggie Grace's Shannon would probably be in abundance. For most viewers, though, emulating Jorge Garcia's Hurley would be the best of all possible worlds.
Like the subject of Rudyard Kipling's "If," Hurley has kept his head when all about him are losing theirs. Like that poem's ideal hero, he doesn't necessarily look too good nor talk too wise, but on the fractious island, he's a friend to all and an enemy to none, a gentle giant perfectly willing to do hard labor, deskwork or even invent a liberating game of island golf. It's no wonder that Fox and Holloway and Evangline Lilly may get the press, Garcia has broken out as one of the show's most popular stars.
"I feel like suddenly I get a bit better customer service, where people are more anxious to help me," Garcia says of his public reception. "Usually when people spot me, they're really happy to see me."
While the other characters on "Lost" constantly appear grimy and miserable, stressed out and on the verge of giving up, Hurley always just seems happy to be alive. He's quick with a joke, the only castway who could possibly be described as happy-go-lucky. Garcia seems to be the same way. The 25-year-old actor arrived at auditions for "Lost" before the character of Hurley even existed and found himself reading pages for Sawyer. Even once producers assured him that his character would exist and that there copies of the pilot script were available, the actor wasn't in any kind of rush to see how many lines he got or whether he'd get to have any big emotional moments. Most familiar from comedic work on "Becker" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm," Garcia had all the information he needed. "I had faith in J.J. Abrams and shooting in Hawaii and that was pretty much all I needed to hear," he laughs.
For the first half of the shooting schedule, production has just been wish fulfillment for the Nebraska-born actor.
"I love what I've gotten to do so far," he says. "The whole thing where I ran away from the plane and it exploded behind me and we dove out in the sand, very action star-ish, I thought that was awesome. That's not something I really expected that I would get to do in my career."
Garcia notes, "Really all I need is a sword fight and I'll be totally satisfied."
Viewers, however, are far from satisfied with the mere snippets of knowledge they've received about the life of Hugo Reyes. While certain characters, including Fox's Jack, have already had multiple episodes dedicated to their backstories, Hurley has gone entirely unexplained, barring some cryptic hints. That won't change until the season's 18th hour, an episode which hasn't even been shot yet. Garcia, in fact, hasn't even seen a script, though the producers have let him in on the character's "big secret." Whatever that secret may be, Garcia isn't telling.
"Because there were hints laid out, I kinda had an idea that it was coming from here," he hedges, revealing nothing of his backstory. "And then when I really stepped back and looked at it in the context of who Hurley has been up to this point, with the group, and that coming out in his revelation. Yeah, I thought it was pretty cool."
On the Internet, wags have been speculating for weeks over a perplexing line of dialogue where Hurley refers to his normal life by saying, "I'm known as something of a warrior myself," a statement that has prompted buzz that Hurley could be everything from an extremely large undercover spy to an extremely dedicated Dungeons and Dragons (continued...)