Remember Lost? That early-2000s TV show about a plane crash on a remote island cloaked by a mysterious force field, hidden from every map?

Remember “the Others”—the shadowy figures who stalked and toyed with the survivors, a group that initially seemed hopelessly unprepared for their new habitat?

And remember how, episode by episode, it became clear these castaways weren’t exactly the woolly little lambs they’d initially appeared to be?

Now, we go deeper still, comparing the characters we knew then with the actors who portrayed them, and where they are now.

#1 Josh Holloway As James “Sawyer” Ford

James “Sawyer” Ford was best known for his sarcastic and selfish demeanor, and his background was as tainted as Austen’s.

Before the crash, he was a conman, and on the island, he was a hoarder, happy to deprive his fellow castaways of the essentials.

His repulsive veneer would eventually give way to expose a romantic interest in Kate, or Freckles as he liked to call her, who was at the time involved with Shepard.

As Sawyer’s character develops, he shows a selfless side, particularly when he gives up his chance to escape the island for the benefit of his friends.

Like Hurley, Sawyer took on a leadership role under the alias Jim LaFleur, who was the head of Dharma in a time hop until 1977.

Since the series’ conclusion, Josh Holloway has appeared in high-grossing titles like Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (2011), Paranoia (2013), and Sabotage (2014), among others.

More recently, he played Roarke in the 2020-2021 Season of Yellowstone and Jim Ellis in Duster in 2025, where he is a getaway driver in 1970s Phoenix per IMDb—again at the behest of Lost creator J.J. Abrams. 

But these roles did not just fall into his lap. Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter in May this year, Holloway said: 

“I had a hard seven years. Just hard — nothing was coming through. I had to focus on my family. I learned piano. I did all sorts of different things. I started telling my agents, ‘Just bring me work, I need to get out of the house, it’s ridiculous.’”

Holloway, now 56, is married to Yessica, 51, whom he met in a bar in 1999. The two became parents of a girl named Java, now 16, and a boy named Hunter, now 11.

Image credits: ABC/Lost

#2 Matthew Fox As Jack Shephard

Matthew Fox played the intelligent spinal cord surgeon Jack Shepard, who naturally filled the role of leader among his fellow survivors.

His character cast him as 34 years old, which was perhaps realistic given his looks at the start of the series, but as the seasons played out, a discrepancy was noticed.

He appeared to be aging faster than the rest of the cast, and Reddit picked up on this anomaly as one netizen, mirroring a slew of similar sentiments, wrote:

“He was already 38 in Season 1, and you age pretty rapidly, late-30s to mid-40s. It’s kinda the point some decline sets in.”

Fox’s role in the TV series earned him a Satellite Award in 2005 and, along with his fellow cast members, a Screen Actors Guild Award for “Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series” in 2006.

After Lost, he starred in the miniseries Emperor (2012), Alex Cross (2012), World War Z (2013), and Bone Tomahawk (2015), among others. 

He took a 7-year hiatus and returned to the stage for Last Light (2022), and will appear in the upcoming Yellowstone offshoot, The Madison, which is currently in post-production.

Fox, now 59, was last known to be living a quiet life in Bend, Oregon, with his wife, Margherita Ronchi. In 2018, Realtor.com reported that he had listed his mountain hideaway for $4 million.

A father to two adult children, Kyle (27) and Byron (24), Fox is also an avid aviator. Perhaps there’s something quietly philosophical about spending years pretending to survive a plane crash, only to later choose flying as a hobby.

Image credits: ABC/Lost

#3 Evangeline Lilly As Kate Austen

Deceptively doe-eyed, Kate Austen was anything but innocent. 

Before her island exile, she racked up a rap sheet that included blowing up her abusive stepfather’s house, dragging her mother into a fraudulent insurance claim, masterminding a bank robbery, and marrying a cop under a false identity.

Even on the island, her ethics were murky, most notably when she encouraged Sun Kwon to poison her own husband.

While the Kate Austin character attracted a string of nominations, she won no awards.

Evangeline Lilly (45) in real life contrasts with the conniving demeanor of the series’ central female character.

She wanted to retire in 2010 when the series ended, but show business was not ready to let go of her.

First, it was The Hobbit in 2013 and 2014, then, among others, the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2015, 2018, 2019, and 2023. 

In 2024, she finally realized her decision to step back from acting and celebrated with a throwback video of herself on the Lost set. 

In the nearly two-decade-old footage, she can be seen talking about how she wanted to retire from acting in favor of rearing a family, writing, and humanitarian work.

It is nearly two decades later, and according to Lilly, she has ticked all the boxes.

Over the two decades after Lost, she has lived in Hawaii, per Esquire, British Columbia, Canada, and Indiana. 

She has two sons, Kahekil and Baby, with her partner Norman Kali, who were born in 2011 and 2015, respectively.

Lilly met Kali while filming Lost when she was already in a serious relationship with one of her cast members, but we will get to that soon enough, so stay tuned.

Image credits: ABC/Lost

#4 Naveen Andrews As Sayid Jarrah

The character Sayid was the personification of menace. 

Naveen Andrews depicted a man with a history in Iraq’s notorious Republican Guard, where he served as an interrogator.

On the island, while battling the ghosts of his past, he filled the role of a protector and leader, channeling his dark skills for good.

His initial perspective of the Lost storyline was discouraging, and although a cast member, it did not detract from him being one of the show’s biggest critics.

He called out producers for not setting an end date and claimed that it “stretched out” the storyline, compromising its quality. This criticism was by far his worst.

In 2007, Esquire reported him as saying: “When I first got the premise, it was limited at best and dreadful at worst. People crashing on an island—how many possible permutations can you get out of that?” 

But despite his misgivings, his portrayal of Sayid would win him accolades. He landed a Primetime Emmy for “Supporting Actor” in 2005 and a Golden Globe for “Best Supporting Actor” in 2016.

Following the conclusion of Lost, he contributed to Sense8 (2015), Instinct (2018), The Cleaning Lady, and The Dropout, which released their first episodes in 2022, among others.

Andrews is currently filming The Last King of Cross in Australia, where he takes on the character Ray Kinnock.

When not filming, he splits his time between Los Angeles and Hawaii.

Andrews has two sons: Jaisal, 33, whom he shares with his former math teacher, Geraldine Feakins, and Joshua, 19, whom he sired with American Actress and media personality, Elena Eustache.

Image credits: ABC/Lost

#5 Ian Somerhalder As Boone Carlyle

Boone Carlyle, 25 at the time, played by Ian Somerhalder, was, by comparison, a poster child for pureness of character. 

And so the series’ creators, in their bid to heighten the drama and impress upon the show’s audiences that the island was not a friendly haven for the marooned survivors, saw fit to sacrifice him early in the storyline.

In the 20th Episode, Do No Harm, Boone climbed into a small aircraft wedged onto the side of a cliff, in an attempt to reach its radio so that they could contact the outside world for help. 

The plane would become unbalanced and fall off the cliff with Boone inside, and despite Jack’s expertise in medicine, he succumbed to his injuries.

Although he was k*lled off early in the show, he appeared to the other outcasts in visions from time to time.

After his contribution to the series, he starred in eight seasons of The Vampire Diaries between 2009 and 2017.

While he has since stepped away from television in favor of environmentalism, business, and family, he has not ruled out acting entirely.

Somerhelder, now 46, lives on a farm outside Los Angeles with his wife, Nicki Reed, 37, and two children—a girl named Bodhi Soleil, born in 2017, and a son born in 2023, whose name they have not yet disclosed to the public.

In a 2023 interview with E! News, he said:

“We’re farm people, we produce most of our own food, I live in my cowboy boots.”

Image credits: ABC/Lost

#6 Terry O’quinn As John Locke

Named after the 1600s philosopher and so-called “father of liberalism,” this character was a living, talking testimony to the fact that there was something special about the island.

When the plane crashed, the otherwise wheelchair-bound John Locke, played by Terry O’Quinn, was miraculously able to walk again. 

Back in his fictional real life, he worked at a box and toy store company after his father pushed him out of a window, paralyzing him from the waist down.

Along with the other corrections experienced by this character was his existential crisis. 

Locke found purpose on the island, and it was he who found the hatch to The Swan, an electromagnetic research station where keepers were required to enter a set of numbers every 108 minutes to stave off global catastrophe.

Locke, an otherwise benign man with smiling eyes–who played backgammon with Michael’s son and built a cradle for Claire’s baby–proved to be a different character altogether when it came to the hatch.

But whatever his flaws, his 2007 “Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series” suggests that industry savants loved him.

O’Quinn would also scoop up SAG and Saturn awards for his contributions to the show.

After the series ended, he reunited with Daniel Dae Kim for Hawaii 5-0 (2011-2018) and was featured in 666 Park Avenue (2012-2013), Emergence (2019-2020), and FBI: Most Wanted (2021-2025).

In 2024, O’Quinn took on the character Major General Beale in The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live and Grandpa James in Unsung Heroes.

The 73-year-old actor and his partner, Kate, currently live in Virginia with their three cats, Momo, Mr. Jed, and Charlie.

Speaking to The Newberry News in 2021, he referred to Lost as one of his “two or three favorite experiences.”

Image credits: ABC/Lost

#7 Henry Ian Cusick As Desmond Hume

Desmond Hume had been on the island for three years before Oceanic Flight 815 made its last landing. He had been shipwrecked in a solo sailing race.

Not unlike the rest, his back story was not a tale of success. He had been fired as a monk, his relationship with love interest Penny Widmore ran aground, and he had been dishonorably discharged from the Royal Scots Regiment.

On the island, he realized that his partner, Kelvin Inam, a former army serviceman turned intelligence officer, was secretly orchestrating an escape from the island.

Hume confronted him and accidentally k*lled him; an action that would lead to the neglect of The Swan and ultimately bring down Oceanic Flight 815.

He and Locke would team up to test The Swan and see if it was a scam. The result was an implosion that destroyed the so-called hatch, left a crater where it once stood, and left Hue with the burden of dark premonitions.

It was one of these visions that led him to believe that Charlie Pace’s days were numbered.  

Henry Ian Cusick, 58, received nothing more than ensemble awards like his co-stars for his contributions to the show.

After its conclusion, he starred in Scandal (2012), The 100 (2014), The Passage (2019), and MacGyver (2020), among others. 

Additionally, he donned the hat of director for The 100 and Dress, which scooped the “Kering Women in Motion Award” at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

He currently lives in Hawaii with his wife Annie and three sons, Eli, 31, Lucas, 27, and Esaú, 25, per IMDb.

Image credits: ABC/Lost

#8 Daniel Dae Kim As Jin-Soo Kwon

Under the impression that his wife, Sun, like him, did not understand English, the character Jin-Soo Kwon found camaraderie in their isolation, so much so that he felt betrayed when she disclosed otherwise. 

This camaraderie appeared even more lopsided when Jin tried to control her by covering her bare shoulders and shouted at her angrily when she donned a bikini one day.

In the second instance, Michael (Harold Perrineau) dropped what he was doing–at that point, building a raft–to intervene.

That night, the same raft caught fire, and Jin, trying to douse the flames, burned himself. 

Thanks to the earlier altercation with Michael, some of the crash survivors, including Sawyer, thought Jin was the arsonist and dragged him to Michael with the intention of beating a confession out of him.

It was at this moment that Sun spoke English for the first time, calling on her husband’s attackers to “stop.”

Jin later learned titbits of English, allowing him to participate in group activities with his fellow castaways.

After Lost, Daniel Kim Dae’s career streamlined into Hawaii Five-0, where he played Chin Ho Kelly from 2010 to 2017, followed by movies like Hellboy (2019), Always Be My Maybe (2019), Raya and the Last Dragon (2021), and Joy Ride (2023).

Other features include Angel, Star Trek: Enterprise, ER, 24, and in 2025, Butterfly, among others.

Dae, 56, married Mia Haeyoung Rhee in a 1993 procession that made it to the New York Times. 

He currently lives in Los Angeles.

His oldest son, Zander, 28, splits his time between Hawaii and California while Dae’s youngest, Jackson, is 22 and just completed his studies at NYU. 

As seen on his LinkedIn profile, he is pursuing a modeling career in New York. 

Dae regularly informs his fans of his activities, which currently include producing the six-episode series, Butterfly, in which he plays the protagonist. 

Image credits: ABC/Lost

#9 Jorge Garcia As Hugo “Hurley” Reyes

Hugo “Hurley” Reyes was a source of comedy for a better part of the show, particularly through his interactions with Sawyer.

He was also portrayed as the conscientious, compassionate, kind, and morally aware member of his group. 

His role became more serious when he succeeded, even Jack Shepard, in becoming “protector of the island.”

Garcia continued his rounds on the Hollywood circuit after Lost and starred in, among other productions, Alcatraz in 2012, which was intended as a replacement for the castaway series, but the rankings tapered out so quickly that it just about survived its first season.

Garcia also acted in the 2010 “Blitzgiving” episode of How I Met Your Mother, Hawaii Five-0 (2013-2019), David Spade’s The Wrong Missy (2020) as the “guy on plane,” and Season 7 of The Masked Singer in 2022.

He married Rebecca Birdsall as she announced on her Instagram in June 2019, and welcomed a baby girl in 2021.

Now 52, he lives in Anaheim, California, and regularly informs his fans about his home and work life, including scenes from his current gig, Bookie, on HBO Max.

Image credits: ABC/Lost

#10 Dominic Monaghan As Charlie Pace

Dominic Monaghan first auditioned for the role of Sawyer. 

Not making the cut, he was written into the role of an old, worn-out rocker, which was also scrapped in favor of a younger one-hit wonder with a h*roine habit–all because producers thought it would be more relatable.

While this was a whole new character, Charlie Pace, producers paralleled his arc with that of Sawyer so that he would depart from his darker proclivities in favor of selflessness.

Pace took self-sacrifice to a level beyond that of Sawyer for the sake of his fellow castaways.

Having learned via Desmond Hume (Henry Ian Cusick) that his love interest, Claire Littleton (Emilie de Ravin) and her child Aaron’s escape from the island was conditional upon his demise, Pace, in his bid to warn his fellow survivors of an impending danger, took his own life. 

Think: The Looking Glass signal station.

Although he passed away, to Hurley, he was still very much alive and appeared to him in visions. 

While Monaghan did not win any accolades for his role in the series, he was nominated for a Saturn Award for “Best Supporting Actor on Television.”

After Lost, Monaghan, 48, appeared in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), The Day (2011), Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), and Edge of the World (2021), among others.

He currently lives in Los Angeles and is said to have a penchant for the outdoors. 

He was recently featured in the travel log Billy and Dom Eat the World, in which the two visited Ian McKellen’s pub in London.

Online gossip outlet Just Jared reported him being seen with aspiring actress Eliana Perez in December 2024.

And here is the juicy tidbit you have been waiting for: It is not widely known that Monaghan dated his Lost co-star Evangeline Lilly from 2004 to 2007. \

He told E! News in 2022 that they had been so serious about their relationship that he entertained the idea of marrying her and having kids.

Monaghan remains childless to this day.

Image credits: ABC/Lost

#11 Michael Emerson As Ben Linus

Ben Linus, played by Michael Emerson, started out as a snake in the grass. 

He lied and said his name was Henry Gale of Minnesota, claiming to have crashed onto the island in his hot air balloon when, in fact, he had been on the island since he was eight.

Also, he gassed his father to d*ath for forgetting his birthday, ousted the island’s leader, Charles Widmore, and took his place.

Linus was portrayed as a manipulating character with generally loose morals. He always appeared to have a hidden agenda when working alongside the crash survivors.

But like Sawyer, Charlie Pace, and others, his uncouth approach to achieving his ends would mellow and give way to a conflicted, sympathetic personality—especially after his daughter Alex was k*lled.

Emerson, 70, played his bad guy character to perfection and won a Primetime Emmy Award in 2009 for “Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series.” 

This came after nominations two years prior and another for a Golden Globe in 2009.

Emerson got back on the wagon after Lost and was featured in Person of Interest (2011) and the voice of The Joker in the animated movie Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2 in 2013.

He took to the screen again in 2019 and 2024 with his wife of 27 years, Carrie Preston, 58, with whom he is currently acting in the ongoing Elsebeth.

The couple currently lives in New York City.

Image credits: ABC/Lost

#12 Yunjin Kim As Sun-Hwa Kwon

Some sources claim Yunjin Kim initially auditioned for the role of Kate Austen. 

Though she didn’t land the part, producers saw something in her and created a character tailor-made to fit: Sun-Hwa Kwon.

Sun begins the series as the seemingly submissive wife of Jin-Soo (played by Daniel Dae Kim) and daughter of a mobster, pretending not to understand English. 

Her marriage is rocky, strained by Jin’s resentment over their infertility and her past affair, but the tables turn when she shocks her husband by revealing her fluency in English. 

This revelation breaks their isolation and allows her to form bonds with fellow survivors like Kate and Hurley.

Yet, these same relationships would widen the rift between her and Jin.
 
That is, until the pair miraculously conceives on the island. 

Sun eventually returns home under the impression that Jin has died and seeks revenge.

After Lost, Kim, now 51, returned to her native South Korea, landing notable TV roles. 

But Hollywood wasn’t done with her either. She starred opposite Alyssa Milano in Mistresses (2013–2016) and appeared in the final season of Station 19 in 2024.

Off-screen, Kim married her former manager, Jeong Hyeok Park, in Hawaii in 2010, per E! News.

There has thus far been no information about any children.

Image credits: ABC/Lost

#13 Emilie De Ravin As Claire Littleton

Claire Littleton boarded Oceanic Flight 815 pregnant and was on her way to Los Angeles to give her child up for adoption. 

As a result of the crash, she gave birth on the island and started a contentious relationship with Charlie Pace. 

Cutting a diminutive figure, she presented an uneasy target for the others, and they kidnapped her. When she returned to the group, her memory had been wiped. 

Her amnesia would eventually dissipate, only for her to become unhinged after following an apparition of her late father into the jungle and living there for three years. 

Fans were not happy with this twist in Emilie de Ravin’s character and said as much on Reddit.

“It really should have been Claire filling that role as Top Female/leader along with Sawyer,” wrote one person, summing up the general sentiment.

“Claire and Sawyer should have had the love affair/bonding time with all the time travel and dharma etc. Plus it would have made it more interesting when Kate came back,” a disgruntled netizen wrote.

De Ravin took a year-long break at the end of Lost and resumed acting in 2011, appearing in the movie Love and Other Troubles, the seven-season series Once Upon a Time, and True Colours (2022), among others.

Along with fellow Lost cast members, de Ravin won the Screen Actors Guild Award in 2006 for “Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series” and scooped up a Gold Derby Award for “Ensemble of the Year” again in 2008.

In 2007, 2008, and 2010, she was nominated for Golden Nymph Awards at the Monte-Carlo TV Festival for “Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series.”

Despite being a naturalized American citizen, de Ravin, now 43, lives in her native Australia.

She is engaged to writer and director Eric Bilitch, with whom she has two daughters, Vera Audery, 9, and Alice Enid,1, and a 6-year-old son, Theodore Kubrick.

Image credits: ABC/Lost

#14 Harold Perrineau As Michael Dawson

Harold Perrineau played Michael Dawson, the father of Walt, who is cast as a 10-year-old in the series.

His character in Lost revolves around protecting his son and trying to free him after the others kidnap him.

As the story goes, Michael Dawson had just emerged victorious from a lengthy custody battle when they crash landed on the island.

Despite his intentions, the connection between the two is tenuous, and Walt finds an alternative, more gratifying source of companionship in John Locke.

Like Andrews, Perrineau was known for his outspokenness about the show, especially on issues of diversity.

TV critic Maureen Ryan’s 2023 book, Burn it Down, quoted the actor as saying: “It became pretty clear that I was the Black guy. Daniel [Dae Kim] was the Asian guy … and then you had Jack and Kate and Sawyer.”

The Radio Times reported Lost’s producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse reacting to the allegations in 2024. 

They acknowledged a discrepancy but claimed, “Every single actor had expressed some degree of disappointment that they weren’t being used enough…”

Aside from the ensemble awards shared with his fellow cast members, Perrineau received no individual accolades.

Perrineau is currently playing Boyd Stevens in the sci-fi horror series From. His comments on his work experience there appeared more positive when he told Radio Times:

“It’s really nice to see this cast with lots of different people, different shades, different backgrounds, different sexual orientations, all get a chance to shine as human beings, not just in some niche of like, ‘This is how gay people act,’ ‘This is how Black people act.’”

A 2022 report by the New York Times indicated that he was living in Los Angeles with his wife, Brittany, and their three daughters: Aurora, 30, Wynter Aria, 17, and Holiday Grace,11.

Image credits: ABC/Lost

#15 Michelle Rodriguez As Ana Lucia Cortez

Michelle Rodriguez, 26 at the time of her first appearance in Lost, is known for her ability to portray strong, if not stubborn, characters, and she was no different in her role of Ana Lucia Cortez.

She debuted in the first season’s finale as the leader of the tail section of Oceanic Flight 815’s survivors.

In her fictional past life, she was a cop, and like everyone else on the island, she had emotional baggage. Her story stemmed from a shooting that claimed the life of her unborn child.

The series depicts her exacting revenge on the perpetrator before resigning from the Los Angeles police department.

Her strong character was seen again as she led her island group, albeit only for a short while before being ousted, and through her k*lling of two other characters, Shannon and Goddwin.

Unlike some of her Lost cast members, she never really took a hiatus when the series ended.

She appeared in the Fast and Furious sequels (2003, 2011, 2009, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2021, 2023), Avatar (2009), Resident Evil (2002 and 2012), and Dungeons & Dragons (2023).

Rodriguez, now 47, hosts the Gangsters of the Seas podcast, in which she probes the lives of historic pirates who prowled the Indian Ocean. 

While she is known to have been intimate with S**cide Squad alum Cara DeLevine, Baywatch actor Zac Efron, and even Fast and Furious co-star Vin Diesel, there is no sign of significant or ongoing love interests—or children, for that matter.

Image credits: ABC/Lost

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