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As the onetime leader of the enigmatic "Others" on the hit ABC-TV series "Lost," Michael Emerson's Benjamin Linus has become one of TV's most deliciously diabolical villains. The consummate Machiavellian manipulator, Ben has spent the better part of four seasons deceiving, scheming, and torturing an unsuspecting band of weary and frustrated plane crash survivors stranded on a mysterious, mystical island, leaving viewers perplexed, dazzled, angry and primed to hurl objects at the television set.

But it wasn't always this way for the 55-year-old Emerson. Before rocketing to fame with his Emmy Award-winning role on "Lost," Emerson had carved out a formidable career on stage, where he brought to life a series of much more cerebral and introspective characters. His theatre resume includes the ineffectual George Tesman, the put-upon scholar and husband of the title anti-heroine in the Kate Burton-starring Hedda Gabler on Broadway in 2001; a forlorn, perpetually inebriated Ivy League washout (Willie Oban) in the Kevin Spacey-headlined The Iceman Cometh in 1999; and, most memorably, his breakthrough role in 1997 as the silver-tongued aesthete-turned-disgraced laughingstock Oscar Wilde in Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.

Emerson says he certainly wasn't used to playing the kind of action-heavy sequences that are endemic to the adventure-cum-sci-fi epic "Lost" — from wielding rifles and sharp objects, torturing prisoners and manipulating people like chess pieces, to facing down "smoke monsters" and "moving" tropical islands within the time-space continuum.

	Terry O'Quinn with Michael Emerson on "Lost"
	photo by Mario Perez/ © ABC

In fact, for his very first day on the job in Hawaii (where "Lost" is filmed), Emerson found himself wired up in a tree in a hot air balloon (where he first became known to "Lost" fans under the spurious moniker, Henry Gale). As a classically trained New York theatre actor, Emerson recounts the "disorientation" of waking up on his first day "in the middle of the Pacific, when the sun hasn't risen yet, and you're riding in a van with strangers. You go out to this jungle location, and they string you up in a tree," he says, with a laugh. "You're just trying to keep your cool and remember your lines."

Despite the challenge of adjusting to the physical demands of an adventure-style TV drama like "Lost," Emerson says his background as a stage actor has prepared him to bring to life Ben's complex emotions, villainous scheming, not to mention his newfound vulnerability.

"It continues to feel like I'm in a good play," says Emerson. "I have lots of dangerous, breathless, highly compressed scenes in small spaces that give me the same satisfaction I used to get doing many plays. It's as good to me, sometimes, as doing a Pinter play or something similar, in which it's loaded with subtext and the stakes are very high if somewhat obscure. ....I've lucked out getting on a show where I like the writing and I like the situations I'm given. I have really enjoyed the scene work, and I didn't know that I would at first." Continued...