*This article contains Lost spoilers for 5.07!
Lance Reddick is a man who chooses his words carefully.
Who can blame him? The Baltimore native appears in two of television’s most mysterious shows.
He stars as Phillip Broyles in the Fox sci-fi drama “Fringe” and returns Wednesday night to “Lost” (at 9 p.m. on WCVB, Ch. 5) as the mysterious Matthew Abaddon. The episode promises to reveal what happened to John Locke (Terry O’Quinn) once he left the island. That’s all Reddick is allowed to say.
“I’m in the episode a lot,” Reddick said cryptically in a phone interview last week from Los Angeles. “One of the first things people ask me is, ‘What can I tell them?’ It’s hard because you want to give them something, but I can’t, and also, quite frankly, I don’t know enough to give them anything, anyway.”
Matthew has visited Hurley (Jorge Garcia) in a mental institution and recruited the team that landed on the island last season.
“In every episode I’ve done on ‘Lost,’ even though it’s the same guy, he seems to be a different guy. So I literally feel like I’m making it up each episode as I’m going along,” he said.
“Rather than worrying about what are the details of this guy’s past, I just try to focus on what I can gather. It’s easy for me to gather he’s kind of a master of disguise and very duplicitous.”
Reddick began shooting his first episode of “Lost” last year just weeks after he had wrapped up the series finale of “The Wire” as Lt. Cedric Daniels. He surprised himself by getting emotional about the end of the critically acclaimed HBO series.
“I realized we had become family and what we were doing was so special. I had always kind of understood it intellectually, but it really hit me in my gut how I was part of a piece of television history.”
Reddick was working odd jobs in Boston and trying to launch a music career when he decided to start going to acting auditions. He landed roles in local productions, including a Christmas music revue in Quincy, and eventually decided to apply to the Yale School of Drama.
Upon graduation, he landed the part of the understudy for Jeffrey Wright in “Angels in America” and his career took off.
“I really started acting because I was floundering and I thought it would help my music career, and it took over my life,” he said.
When “Fringe” returns to Fox on April 7, Reddick said viewers will get to see more of his character’s personal life.
And what else?
Once again, Reddick speaks with great care.
“You’ll see the connection of the pattern to some of the major characters of the show.”
