Category Archives: Ben (Michael Emerson)

Michael Emerson was “flummoxed” by the ending of The Incident

Posted on August 13, 2009 | Leave a comment

As always, I love to listen to Michael Emerson talk, and I love the way he has the same questions about the show that we, the viewers, do:

Q: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about The Incident, what your take-away from that was, and what questions you’ve been asking yourself during the hiatus.

ME: Since the finale …

Q: Yeah.

ME: I’m flummoxed. (Laughter from the audience.) Honestly, it wasn’t one, but it was two big old earth-shattering cliffhangers, and I’ll be damned if I know what either of them mean, or what either of them lead to. Honestly, what can be the next breathing moment of the show? I have no idea, and I won’t know until two days before the camera rolls, I’ll get a script, and I will read it with some relish, because I’m curious to see where do we go from there.

I don’t know if Jacob is a killable entity. We’re always plunging knives into things, or shooting things on LOST, but it doesn’t mean that they go away. (Laughter) It may just trigger them to transform into something else.

Emerson goes on to talk about the “psychological landscape” of the scene where Ben stabbed Jacob. Then he takes questions from the audience.

This interview was conducted by EW’s Doc Jensen and Dan Snierson at Comic-Con 2009. I found it via LOST: On the Road, a very cool blog totally focused on Michael Emerson.

Video of the Comic-Con LOST panel

Posted on July 25, 2009 | Leave a comment

LOST Comic-Con Panel 2009

Here’s the video of the whole thing (except for the clips):

Video by Totsie14

Michael Emerson’s Emmy-winning role in “The Practice”

Posted on July 19, 2009 | 2 comments

I hope the third time will be the charm for Michael Emerson, who has just been nominated again for an Emmy for playing Benjamin Linus, after being nominated for that role, but losing, twice before.

Emerson did win a much-deserved Emmy for an earlier role as a guest actor on the legal show The Practice in 2001. He played William Hinks, a man accused of being a serial killer.

Michael Emerson as William Hinks on "The Practice"

The first segment of the story is about Hinks’ trial. You can watch it in five YouTube videos, which is not as daunting as it sounds, as several of the videos are very short. All together, this segment runs about 15 minutes. If you watch all five videos, you’ll be rewarded with a clever plot twist.

(The network may pull these off of YouTube, as they did previous copies that were posted, so enjoy them while you can.)

Michael Emerson is mesmerizing in this multi-layered role. He acts rings around the other actors. You can also see the similarities between William Hinks and Ben Linus. Hinks is like Ben on a bad day — or, perhaps, on a good day, depending on your perspective:

According to Wikipedia (citing audio commentary on the Season 3 DVD), the LOST producers offered Emerson the role of Ben because they liked his work on The Practice. Emerson, though, in an interview a few months ago, said he thought he only “indirectly” got the job on LOST because of The Practice.

He added, laughing, that the two roles are “at least in the same temperature zone.”

Would that be cold (as an icy heart) or hot (as the inner circle of Hell)?

The Practice (c) 20th Century Fox. The screenshot is from video #4, when Hinks is on the witness stand.

2 Comments

Posted in Ben (Michael Emerson), Emmy, Interviews, Other roles

LOST nominated for five Emmy Awards

Posted on July 16, 2009 | 4 comments

Great news: LOST got nominated for best drama series, Michael Emerson got nominated, for the third time, for best supporting actor, and Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof got nominated for best writing for the season finale episode, The Incident

Here’s the complete list of all the nominations for LOST:

Outstanding drama series: LOST
Outstanding supporting actor in a drama series: Michael Emerson
Outstanding writing for a drama series: Cuse and Lindelof, for The Incident
Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing For A Drama Series: Stephen Semel, Mark Goldman, and Chris Nelson, for The Incident
Outstanding Sound Mixing For A Comedy Or Drama Series (One Hour): Robert Anderson, Ken King, Scott Weber, and Frank Morrone, for The Incident

Source: Emmy site

Here’s a video clip of LOST winning Best Drama Series in 2005, for its first season:

Picture of Emmy Award from Wikipedia

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Posted in 5x16-17 The Incident, Ben (Michael Emerson), Damon and Carlton, Emmy

Michael Emerson, 17 years ago

Posted on July 16, 2009 | Leave a comment

In 1992, Michael Emerson was already playing characters that hang out with people wearing jumpsuits 😉

In this 1992 training film for prison employees, Michael Emerson plays a prison counselor. He looks so young! He’s a better actor now, and, I think, more interesting-looking. Time has been good to him.

He first appears in the video about a minute-and-a-half in:

Posted on YouTube by mariloulem, who has a whole collection of Michael Emerson videos.

Ask LOST — Michael Emerson (Part 2)

Posted on July 10, 2009 | 2 comments

Michael Emerson in "Ask Lost" part 2

This is the 7th short video in the Ask LOST series. It appears to be the last one that ABC is going to put out, at least for now. So it’s fitting that this portion of the series ends where it began — with Michael Emerson.

He’s my favorite actor, of all the LOST actors, to watch being interviewed. I just love the way he thinks about what he’s saying — you can almost see the gears turning in his head. I love the sound of his voice, as I’ve mentioned before — his stage actor’s diction. Most of all, I love his sense of humor. A great example of that is in the last segment of this video, where he gently pulls our leg with an almost straight face — and then, holding off until the very last moment, he breaks out in a grin.

I do disagree, though, with Emerson’s notion that Ben hasn’t fundamentally changed. I think Ben changed a lot, in this last season — or else we are seeing a radically different side of him that we had never seen before. Ben had always been such a powerful presence, the alpha bad guy, but in Season 5 he became greatly diminished, losing alpha status first to Locke (or, rather, to notLocke), and then to Jacob. In his last scene in the Finale, he seemed to regress back to being a wounded child, which was something far different, though no less lethal, from the terrifying puppetmaster he had been in Seasons 2, 3, and 4.

2 Comments

Posted in Ask Lost, Ben (Michael Emerson), Interviews

Who makes the rules? Esau is to Jacob as Ben is to Widmore

Posted on May 23, 2009 | 8 comments

In the first scene of the finale, we heard Esau (the man in the black shirt) say that he wanted to kill Jacob, but he couldn’t. That scene reminded me of an earlier one, from Season 4, where we heard Ben say that he wanted to kill Widmore — but couldn’t:

Widmore: Have you come here to kill me, Benjamin?
Ben: We both know I can’t do that.

Ben told Widmore that he was going to kill Penelope, and that after she was dead

You’ll wish you hadn’t changed the rules

Here, again, is the opening scene from the Season 5 finale:

Esau: Do you have any idea how badly I want to kill you?
Jacob: Yes
Esau: One of these days, sooner or later, I’m going to find a loophole, my friend.

Ben couldn’t kill Widmore, but he could (in theory) kill Penny. Widmore was able to kill Alex, but apparently only by breaking the rules. Esau needed a loophole to kill Jacob. A loophole suggests there is a law — a set of rules — that has to be circumvented.

A law or a rule may be natural: What goes up must come down. It may be written and enforced by an individual or institution that possesses power: a monarch, a warlord, a constitution, a legislature. It may be supernatural: a God or a strange electromagnetic force.

When we saw Ben and Widmore last season, they were the most powerful forces we had seen up to that point, appearing to control, between the two of them, almost everything that happened on the Island.

This season, it was as if a camera had pulled back and given us a wider shot, showing us the forces behind Ben and Widmore, forces even more powerful than they are. Jacob and Esau are now the most powerful people we have ever seen on the show.

But even Jacob and Esau cannot do everything they want. So there is someone or something powerful enough to make and enforce the rules that limit what Jacob and Esau can do. It may be a law of nature, it may be a person or group of people, it may be a supernatural force or being.

Perhaps next season, after we find out who or what it is, we will discover that it’s just another intermediate layer, and the camera will pull back yet again, to reveal the power behind the power behind the power.