Emmanuel Itier: When did you find the time to do this?

Naveen Andrews: I really still don’t know. For two months, it was nuts. I was doing this in Austin and then flying back to New York to do “The Brave One” with Jodie Foster. So Christ knows how it was done, but I’m glad that it was.

EI: How did you come to get the role?

NA: I came to audition, actually, at this hotel. I met Robert [Rodriguez] in a room maybe four floors up, and we didn’t have a script. It was just a scene which happened to be the castration scene, and naturally I was intrigued and I wanted to know more.

EI: So you had no idea what you were auditioning for–just that it was a Robert Rodriguez film?

NA: No, not at all. I didn’t know what it was. Then we got the script and we knew that it was a kind of an homage to these Grindhouse films of the 1970s, but it was a genre that was unfamiliar to me. Growing up in England, the nearest thing that we had to this was probably Hammer House Horror, which I’m not sure if you’re familiar with. They were really cheap and cheerful, repressed English films with Peter Cushing running around trying to kill a giant moth and women with their tits out. They were terrible, by the way, and so I was subjected to indoctrination and reeducation by Quentin [Tarantino] at his house. We had to go and watch these Grindhouse films, like “Zombie”, “Philandering Manor”, and another one with, I think, Mia Farrow’s sister in it. They were terrible. I thought that they were horrible films—abysmal–and the actors seemed to be suffering in them, and you just felt sorry for everyone in them. I would look around and see Quentin and Robert laughing like maniacs and I found it funny for about two minutes. I was embarrassed. I thought, “What am I not getting here? They obviously see some kind of aesthetic here, and I can’t see it.” I’m still at a loss as to what the aesthetic actually is. I think that it has something to do with an obscene kind of humor or Sigmund Freud, and there is something innocent in that. I think that it comes from Robert, the way that a child likes to be frightened and then quickly reassured.

EI: What’s the difference between shooting “Lost” and shooting a film with Robert Rodriguez?

NA: Well, I have to say that “Lost” is TV, and it’s the first TV series that I’ve ever done and so I can only compare it to that. A TV schedule is relentless, and I don’t want to sound like I’m moaning or whining, but it’s incredibly grueling. And of course, on top of that, it’s a network show. Working with Robert and Quentin, they’re both outlaws, it seems, in this industry. They’re both, like, outside the studio system. There are no producers on the set, and I think that gives them an incredible freedom to create, and some of that must percolate down to the actors and we constantly feel free enough to put balls in our mouths or rummage around in there and find things that might not otherwise happen. So it’s completely different for sure.

EI: Are we going to eventually see a “Lost” movie?

NA: I’ve been hearing that today about a “Lost” film. I think we have to finish the show first. I mean, I don’t know. Maybe you can have a film and a show going on at the same time.

EI: What hasn’t changed on “Lost” since you started doing the show?

NA: Well, I know that we’re building up to one of those big finale things that they do at the end of every year, because the next month is going to be very full, and I have to go back and work next week. What’s not changed since the beginning–and I have to say that I loved the first season and I’m very proud of it and put it up there with the work that I’m most proud of and it will always stand there and be there forever–but I always found it hard that we had no information from the beginning about what we were going to be doing. Sometimes you get a script just before you shoot it and it’s like standing at the police bureau, and that hasn’t changed. You still don’t have any information. I don’t know what I’m doing when I’m going back–I kid you not. So you learn to live with that and become relatively stoic, I guess, about it. And I don’t presume to be a writer, and it’s tough writing for a show like that because I remember getting the original premise and thinking, “How long will this last, all these people on an island?” So I appreciate the task that they have ahead of them, and they are the writers and it’s their show, and they will do what they like with it.

EI: So you just don’t know what’s coming up?

NA: I just don’t know at all.

EI: Does that ever get frustrating, just not knowing what’s going to happen?

NA: Well, right from the very beginning, not having a beginning, middle and an end, and also the incredible challenge of playing the same character over a period of years as opposed to a few months–that’s tough.

EI: And in real time, it’s supposed to be taking place over a short amount of time, right?

NA: Yeah, a month.

EI: You’re so great in the show, and I would think that it’d be very easy for you to get typecast as that character, and yet you’re such a different character in this film. Can you talk about that?

NA: Well, for a start, I’m not Iraqi. I guess it has to do with me as well. I was born to Indian parents, and I consider myself Indian, but I was born in England–in London–and the way that I think and speak is European. Intellectually, I am a European. So I don’t know what I am–some kind of hybrid, but it seems to have served me reasonably well. The character that I play in Jodie’s film, I’m her fiancé, and the accent is probably more like the way that I talk to you now, South London really. So I consider myself to be very fortunate because even though the parts that I’ve played that are Indian, like in “The English Patient”, that’s just a great part and it doesn’t matter what ethnicity or what it is. It’s just a brilliant, romantic part.

EI: So you said you weren’t into the Grindhouse genre. What were you into growing up?

NA: Well, coming from England, we have an innate snobbery and very fixed ideas of what we consider to be art in film, like anything by Pasolini or anything with an ‘I’ at the end of it, and I guess that kind of snobbery I have to get over, because again, Quentin and Robert could see an aesthetic in this execrable genre of filmmaking, in my opinion, and you just have to be a little more open-minded and abandon your preconceptions and judgments that one would normally make.

EI: But you didn’t have any guilty pleasures in terms of genre films growing up?

NA: To me, wonderful filmmakers, and if there are a minority of people who see those films, I can see why because not everyone gets them, I guess, or wants to, but it would be Quentin and Robert who are trying. If anyone is going to find diamonds in the rough, it’s going to be those two, isn’t it?

EI: What director would like to work with the most that you haven’t yet been able to?

NA: [Martin] Scorsese because my girlfriend has worked with him twice. She did “Box Car Bertha” and she did “Last Temptation of Christ”, which has to be one of my favorite films ever, and I would love to work with him. I think that he is the best director in America today.

EI: What was actually in the jar when they were spilling out there?

NA: They were balls, and they were shaven.

EI: Were they bulls’ balls?

NA: I don’t know what creature owned them. They had a kind of hospital taste in your mouth.

EI: Who is your girlfriend?

NA: Oh, Barbara [Hershey]. Nine years, yeah.

EI: Are you going to make an honest woman out of her someday?

NA: Again, I’m from England and I’m from Europe and I’m a snob, and we don’t believe in marriage and things like that, but you never know. You know, things do change. It’s a nice thought, thank you.

EI: Other than “Lost”, what’s up next for you?

NA: We have a hiatus coming up, and I haven’t stopped working since “Lost” started. Every hiatus, I’ve been working and I’ve got a family, man. It’s all there, and maybe I need to have a rest. It’s not like I’m going to starve. Maybe I need to really like take a rest.

EI: Is your family in Hawaii with you?

NA: L.A., and we have a place in Hawaii too, but I come back and forth. As the season has gone on, the run of “Lost” has gone on, and I spend more and more time here in L.A. when I’m not working. The first thing that I do is fly back. It is so important to have a life.

EI: There are more interior shots on the show now too that can probably be done inside on stages, right?

NA: Yeah, but they shoot them on stages there in Hawaii in Diamond Head.

EI: When you have downtime, then what do you like to do?

NA: I play guitar a lot, and a lot of my friends aren’t really actors–they’re musicians. I love reading still too. I feel that I’m educated in a lot of ways and so I read. It’s very important, I guess, to have downtime. You can go mad.

EI: You’re a dad also?

NA: Yeah, I’ve got two kids.

EI: Then how can you relax?

NA: When they’re asleep!

EI: What’s your favorite thing about being a dad?

NA: The best thing about being a dad–and I was never into children before my children were born–the first thing that you realize is that there is a soul, and the nearest thing to divinity is looking into the eyes of your child. From a very selfish point of view, it puts everything into perspective for me. Suddenly this shit isn’t really that important. What’s important is them.

EI: What’s your favorite thing to do with them?

NA: Just to be with them. It doesn’t matter what we’re doing, because when you’re with kids, they know if you’re not there–if you’re not present, and to be present with a child is something extraordinary.

EI: What do you do with them?

NA: With the little one, who’s fifteen months now…the big one, we’ve been together a lot and we’ve been to gigs together, since he’s a teenager. I can’t believe that I’ve got a teenager. I mean, he’s taller than me. He’s 6′3″.

EI: Does he have ground rules and a curfew?

NA: Well, no. He’s not like me when I was his age. At his age, I had already left home. He’s a very different person. He’s kind of innocent in a way that I wasn’t.

EI: Did you play guitar on the set with Robert?

NA: Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s how we passed the time. It might look very chaotic on the screen, but actually, on the set, it was really pretty relaxed.

EI: Did your character have it’s own theme? I know that each character had their own tune.

NA: Yeah, I had my own theme, but he hadn’t developed it at that point. What he would have were these heavy guitars–these kind of guitars underneath it.

EI: What kind of music do you enjoy?

NA: God, everything that’s good, but as a guitar player, it would have to be Hendrix.

Popularity: 2% [?]