Sure, there is football involved, yet Matthew Fox thinks his new film, “We Are Marshall,” is anything but a sports movie.
A real-life football team is at the heart of it — the Marshall University squad that perished when its jet crashed on the way from a game on Nov. 14, 1970 — but the film for him is much more about grief and healing.
“Your classic sports movie, a movie like ‘Rudy,’ I don’t imagine women enjoy that movie that much. It’s more of a guy’s film,” Fox says during a recent interview at Washington’s Four Seasons Hotel before returning to Hawaii and work on his hit TV series, “Lost.” “I would think that this movie is a good movie for any age, any gender to see. It speaks to something deep within all of us and something we can relate to.”
The 40-year-old actor, who first came into households on the Fox drama “Party of Five” and now toplines J.J. Abrams’ head-scratching thriller, has always followed college and pro football but had never heard of the Marshall tragedy, which took the lives of 37 players, eight coaches and staff and 27 others, or the aftermath where new coach Jack Lengyel (played by Matthew McConaughey) and assistant coach Red Dawson (Fox) — who missed the fateful flight — worked through initial struggles to build a new team and bring the Huntington, W.Va., community together.
Fox knew the script was beautiful, powerful and had potential to be a movie that leaves the audience more connected to the people and their lives, he says. But director McG warned him that the real-life Dawson was extremely reticent about talking about that event.
He would have rather flew to Huntington but because of “Lost” schedule conflicts, Fox had to call Dawson and ask him to fly to Hawaii — even though he hadn’t been on a plane in 35 years.
“A half an hour after I shook his hand and looked him in the eye, I knew it was going to be a really good experience and I knew I liked the man an awful lot,” Fox says. “He’s immediately charming and just solid, and yet has this sort of sorrow and melancholy underneath this real sharp wit and twinkle in the eye. I’ve grown to really care about the man.”
The actor mirrored Dawson well physically, adding subtle vocal touches and altering the way he carried himself, but Fox says the key was more finding the essence of him, the emotions he was going through in 1970 and visualizing the memories he had.
But at the end of the day, Fox still needed to question him about the tragedy.
“Red is a really sharp guy and I didn’t want him to feel manipulated in any way,” he explains. “I was very honest with him. Basically I wanted the first couple of days just to be usgetting to know each other. And we did. We just hung out: We drank beer and shot Copenhagen and [talked] and got to know each other. And then I was really honest: ‘At a certain point here, I’m gonna have to start asking you about that time.’ And he said, ‘Matthew, I’ll probably get emotional and there’ll probably be parts of those conversations where I have to stop and when that happens, if you just are patient, I’ll get it together and we’ll continue.’ And that happened a lot of times.
“I think that if there was one person in the world that Red sort of felt that he needed to open up to, considering a huge movie was being made where his story was an instrumental part, it’s probably gonna be the actor playing him.”
In the film, it’s Dawson, wanting to move on from the accident, and Lenyel, wishing to respect those who were lost, who represent the fundamental argument of how someone deals with grief for Fox.
“Each one of us, all of us at some point in our lives, lose someone very dear to us,” he says, “and I think when that happens, the two sides of the argument within yourself is ‘Do I move on and let that grief go?’ or ‘Do I hold on to it out of responsibility to hold on to the memory of the person that I’ve lost?’”
Getting ‘Lost’
“Lost” has made Matthew Fox a household name and face, and it was the first time he ever met a producer — in this case, J.J. Abrams, without having read a script. “J.J. had just said to me, ‘I think you’re Jack Shepherd.’ And I said, ‘That’s great. I don’t know who Jack Shepherd is,’ ” says Fox, who says this current third season is the best ever story-wise for the ABC series (which returns in February). “I’m really fascinated by stories that deal with this question of ‘what is the true nature of the human species?’ Stories like ‘Heart of Darkness’ and ‘Lord of the Flies’ and books that deal with this fundamental question of when the chips are down and we are atour rawest and most fearful do we tend toward compassion and taking care of each other, or do we tend toward brutal self-preservation? And two years later, we are dealing with exactly those questions.”
