Matthew Fox
Matthew Fox is an actor, born 1966.
Matthew Fox (born 1966) modelled before he acted and landed the older brother, Charlie Salinger, on Party of Five in 1994, a job that ran until 2000 and made him a particular kind of nineties television face: earnest, slightly weary, easy to trust.
Lost is the reason anyone remembers him. Jack Shephard was the centre of that show for six years and the hardest role in it, because the character is written as the responsible one and the writing keeps punishing him for it. Fox played him with very little charm and a rising note of hysteria under the competence, which irritated a section of the audience and was almost certainly the right choice. It brought Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy nominations, and his shelf also holds a Screen Actors Guild ensemble award and a Saturn Award for television work.
The film career that followed never found the same shape. We Are Marshall and Emperor gave him decent dramatic leads; Vantage Point, Speed Racer and Alex Cross put him through a run of genre parts with mixed results; World War Z used him for something so small it works as a trivia question. Bone Tomahawk in 2015 is the exception and the best thing he has done on film, as John Brooder, a man whose manners are the most dangerous thing about him. He has worked little since, with a return to television in The Madison.
Movies (11)
TV (8)
Where to start with Matthew Fox
Lost is unavoidable and correct: six years of a lead performance that gets more interesting the worse the character behaves, inside the most argued-over network drama of its decade. If that is too much television, the first season stands on its own.
Bone Tomahawk is the film to watch and it is genuinely excellent, a slow Western that becomes something else entirely, with Fox giving the best screen performance of his career as Brooder. We Are Marshall is the sincere one and works if you like the genre. Party of Five is the origin story and holds up better than nineties family drama usually does. Vantage Point and Alex Cross are the thrillers, watchable and forgettable in that order, and Speed Racer is worth another look now that its reputation has recovered.