Anti hero: sometimes, all it takes to find yourself is to lose everything you think you know

Men's Fitness, March, 2006 by Brian O'Connor

It was January 2005, and Ian Somerhalder was doing what any 26-year-old actor on a top-rated TV series like Lost should be doing: careening through California wine country beneath a sheet of blue sky, steering a slick convertible fueled by good fortune, living life as if it were a dream. Then his cell phone rang. It was his boss's assistant. She said the three Lost producers needed to talk to him. He knew he might not get out of this alive.

"Immediately, I knew," says Somerhalder, sliding his lean but taut 5'9" frame into a seat at Zen Palate, a vegetarian restaurant offering a treetop view of New York City's Union Square park. He orders an herbal drink called a Depth Recharger. "I was a goner. I pulled over to the side of the road, and it was a crossroads: one road where all the vineyards were, intersected by another that goes back to Los Angeles. I was sitting there in this car, sitting at a crossroads being told that I was at a crossroads, and understanding what I needed to do."

In just the first season of ABC's blockbuster Lost--a show kinda like Gilligan's Island but with heroin and sex--Somerhalder learned that his character, Boone Carlyle, a spoiled rich kid ripe for reform, would meet an agonizing end. The first casualty in the breakout watercooler hit series, Somerhalder had been yanked from a guarantee of greater glory, joining the Pete Best Club of thwarted ambition. Obscene fame? Not here. Unimaginable riches? Not now, sorry.

"We all knew [being killed off] was a possibility" says the stubbled Somerhalder, whose bed hair and blue eyes recall a young Rob Lowe. "Everybody knew. Look, it was very hard for the audience to sympathize with a good-looking, spoiled, white, rich kid. I get that. I think it was hard for the writers to do so, as well. I don't fault them for it at all."

It's here that Somerhalder displays the real trick to acting--and to life: putting a positive spin on adversity, whether you're dumped, outsourced, or downsized. "I'm more of a realist, but it's all a positive thing. When you walk into a room, whether you're having a bad day or a great day, and you're able to say to yourself, 'I'm still the luckiest guy in this room'--and hopefully, the guy sitting next to me is saying the same thing about himself--that's the key. It's not easy to empower yourself to do that; sometimes you want to kick something or turn a bottle upside down. I won't lie: It hurt. My whole life as I knew it was going to change drastically and immediately. I had been filming Lost in Hawaii for a year. But there was no fear--other than, 'Oh, gosh, I have to move back to L.A.'"

And to L.A. he returned. It's the location where a large chunk of his own back-story resides. A childhood modeling career had shuttled him from his Louisiana hometown to New York, where he studied acting before then moving to the West Coast. Once there, his roles tended to be young, affluent American males negotiating a minefield of inner conflict--morally ambiguous and sexually confused. On WB's Young Americans, his rich-kid character was shagging a cross-dressing female; as a teenage pimp in Life as a House, he shagged his girlfriend's divorced mother; in Brett Easton Ellis' darkly comic college romp, Rules of Attraction, his bisexual character tried to shag James Van Der Beck; and, of course, on Lost Boone Carlyle shagged his stepsister.

So when producer Bob Weinstein offered him his first big post-Lost role, Somerhalder sensed an artistic stretch and agreed immediately, jetting to Bucharest, Romania, to film Pulse, a Wes Craven remake of a Japanese horror flick in which a computer virus infects users with suicidal tendencies. "I play a lonely computer geek who happens to stumble onto this situation. I'm really curious to see it--I know that we shot a cool movie. I know that there was some good work done by every actor there, and hopefully, it'll work its magic.... But do I think Bob Weinstein would have offered me that movie had I not just been killed off in one of the biggest television shows--and, to me, one of the best TV shows--ever produced? No."

Sipping from his drink, Somerhalder gazes out the window at the dormant oaks in the park. His path has boomeranged him back to New York, where he's currently appearing in the irreverent Off Broadway play Dog Sees God, which, in a perverted way that's perfect for Somerhalder's "indie" persona, follows Charles Schulz's Peanuts gang into high school (he plays Matt, a teenage Pigpen, now a homophobic, obsessive neat freak).

"Do I think everything happens for a reason? I wouldn't be doing a play that I love, surrounded by amazing actors that I adore, living in a city that I call home, if Boone hadn't been killed off," he says. "That's been perhaps the greatest fallout from Lost, moving back to New York. I realize that you work your ass off in New York to get out of New York and to be able to go to L.A. and work. But there's this proliferation of things that come out of you in L.A., and then you find yourself going, 'Wait a minute, I feel like I'm in a vacuum, I need to get back to what's real.' And what you realize is that you've worked your ass off in L.A. to get back to New York. All of my firsts happened here, and that New York energy, you can't buy it--actually, you do have to buy it, and it's ridiculously expensive--but that's what I'm going to do"