One ‘Lost’ tribe to another
Naveen Andrews is a few paces from a wind-swept beach, with nothing but a glass of water to sustain him.
But that water is sparkling and imported from Europe, Andrews is wearing a snappy black leather jacket and the coastline outside the restaurant in which he sits is part of a well-located stretch of Southern California.
Andrews, it turns out, isn’t “Lost” at all. The star of ABC’s hit drama about plane-crash survivors stranded on a mysterious island says he found himself when he came to Los Angeles.
“I never really felt like I had anywhere to call home because I didn’t feel, even though I was born in England, I didn’t think of London as home,” Andrews says.
On this recent visit home from “Lost,” which films in Hawaii, Andrews took time to promote the ABC miniseries “The Ten Commandments” (9 to 11 p.m., tonight and Tuesday) in which he stars with Dougray Scott and Omar Sharif.
It was work that first brought Andrews, 37, to Los Angeles and love that kept him here. He and actress Barbara Hershey played opposite each other in 1999’s “Drowning on Dry Land.”
“We met, we ended up having a relationship and that’s why I stayed,” he says.
He says he’s never had second thoughts about leaving his native England behind.
“It was bloody awful, to be honest,” Andrews says. His Indian ancestry, he explains, left him largely disenfranchised in a country that remains dominated by “small-minded” attitudes toward race and social class.
Andrews candidly concedes that his behavior in Britain contributed to his deep unhappiness.
“I’d basically, virtually, killed my career in England. I used to drink and do drugs and whatever, and in all fairness they (British producers) had to deal with that,” he says.
He found he needed to be “somewhere else, a street that didn’t have a bloody pub on it. Over here, that kind of excessive drinking is frowned upon. It’s not good form to be walking around the streets drunk.”
Andrews first gained attention with his role in 1996’s “The English Patient.” In “Lost,” he landed the role of Sayid, the former Iraqi military officer with a dark past and improbably sexy hair.
He’s playing another military man in “The Ten Commandments” – Menerith, a fictional character who’s part of the Egyptian pharaoh’s army and stepbrother to Moses (Scott).
Andrews, raised as a Methodist, says the miniseries highlights how dogmatic Moses’ professions of faith might have seemed to his contemporaries. It’s a timely depiction, he adds.
“We seem to be the victims of religious dogma, both from the Christian right here and of course in the East with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism,” he says.
But the primary goal for any project, he says, is “to tell a story, a good one. That’s what we have with the Old Testament and the New Testament, good storytelling.”
The birthday bunch
Actor Harry Morgan (“Dragnet,” “M*A*S*H”) is 91. Actor Max von Sydow is 77. Actor Omar Sharif is 74. Sportscaster John Madden is 70. Sportscaster Don Meredith is 68. Actor Steven Seagal is 55. Singer-producer Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds is 48. Musician Brian Setzer is 47. Comedian Orlando Jones is 38. Blues singer Shemekia Copeland is 27. Singer-actress Mandy Moore is 22. Actor Haley Joel Osment (“The Sixth Sense”) is 18.