• March 21, 2005
• Vol. 63
• No. 11

Lost's: Josh Holloway

• 

From PEOPLE Magazine

AGE: 35
HOMETOWN: Free Home, Ga.
LATEST GIG: Sawyer, the conniving castaway you love to hate on ABC's hit series

•Smokey's loss, our gain.
Though he had appeared on Angel and CSI, "I was booking jobs once, maybe twice a year," says Holloway, who grew up in a trailer in the Blue Ridge Mountains and whose first job was picking up dead chickens at a farm, "I thought about being a forest ranger"—until he auditioned for Sawyer a year ago.

•Bad and loving it.
The writers "have started to show Sawyer with some humanity," says Holloway, a former fashion model. But "I don't want to lose his edge." Even if it makes for some uneasy fan encounters. "This 70-year-old man in my building said, 'Every time I see you on TV, I just want to smack you.' I was like, 'I'm going to Starbucks, want coffee?'"

•Aloha I dos.
"You see it a lot in Hollywood: Somebody makes it [big] and drops their partner," muses Holloway's wife, Yessica, the retail director of an L.A. boutique. Not Josh. "He asked me to marry him when he did the Lost pilot [last March]," she says. They eloped to Kauai Oct. 1—days after ABC picked up Lost for the whole season.

•Kiss me, Kate.
Sawyer's smooch with Kate (Evangeline Lilly) on the Nov. 10 episode may have been steamy, but for the actors "it was pretty bizarre," says Lilly. "I feel like a kid sister to him. I told him, 'There's gonna be tongue in this kiss,' and he said, 'Fine by me!'"