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Toronto Sun
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Toronto Sun
Lost for seven years, Josh Holloway is back in driver's seat in Duster
Published May 29, 2025 • Last updated 0 minutes ago • 8 minute read "Duster" star Josh Holloway is headlining a series for the first time since "Colony" ended in 2018. Photo by James Van Evers/Ma / Max/Warner Bros. Discovery Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page. Josh Holloway was stranded in a Hollywood wasteland five years ago when the phone rang. It was J.J. Abrams, and he was offering a route out of the figurative desert – by way of a literal one. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account The third and final season of the Holloway-starring series 'Colony' had aired more than a year earlier. Freshly 50, Holloway accepted that the dystopian drama was probably his last leading-man gig. If the offer came to play, say, a leading man's father? He'd be there. But that wasn't happening, either. 'My agents were like, 'Go take a vacation. You're not going to work,'' recalls Holloway, best known for playing the complicated con man Sawyer on 'Lost.' 'And I didn't for a long time.' Holloway embraced life as a stay-at-home dad while spending his spare time dirt biking, fly-fishing, meditating and steering his Airstream all over. He also honed his guitar skills and learned the piano. On the work front, Holloway dabbled in writing and pitched a reality show about ranch bunkhouses. (It didn't happen.) This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. So when 'Lost' co-creator Abrams rang out of the blue and began hinting at a job offer, Holloway says, he agreed before hearing the pitch. As Abrams subsequently outlined an image from the 1972-set crime series 'Duster' – a muscle car races to a phone in the desert, and out pops Holloway to answer the call – it dawned on the actor that one of Hollywood's most influential creatives was, in fact, shaping a show around him. 'At this age,' Holloway says, 'I really did not expect something like that.' But that didn't mean the lean years were over. Green lit by HBO Max during the pandemic, the pilot didn't shoot until 2021. That pilot was shelved amid the Warner Bros. Discovery merger, then reshot two years later. And the first season was mid-production in 2023 when the Hollywood strikes halted filming for the better part of a year. Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. By the time 'Duster' premiered in May on Max, seven years had passed since Holloway last headlined a series. In the meantime, the 55-year-old's only jobs have been a recurring role as a duplicitous hedge fund manager on 'Yellowstone' and one episode of the anthology 'Amazing Stories.' 'With actors, if you don't see them for a while, you think that they're hiding in a closet or something,' his 'Duster' co-star Keith David says. 'People work. You don't see them, but they do work. So it's really wonderful to see him in a leading part. He's the kind of guy who can carry that.' Rachel Hilson plays an FBI agent who recruits Holloway's Jim Ellis as an informant. Photo by Ursula Coyote/Max Sure enough, Holloway still seizes the screen as if he never left it. As Jim Ellis, the rakish driver for a Southwestern organized crime kingpin (David) and an informant for an upstart FBI agent (Rachel Hilson), Holloway is parked right in his wheelhouse. With a sigh or a smile, Jim shakes off life-and-death developments as another day at the office. His shoulder-length locks flow in the desert breeze. Sarcastic quips roll off his tongue, and he throws around nicknames in decidedly Sawyer-like fashion. Yet there's torment and tenderness behind eyes that'll smolder one moment and flicker with sorrow the next. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. It's a classic performance from a dying breed of actor: the career television star. Co-created by Abrams and LaToya Morgan, 'Duster' is a throwback to a forgone era of episodic storytelling, built around charismatic characters and pulpy thrills rather than A-list star power and prestige TV sheen. Driving it all is Holloway, a slick performer with an affinity for fueling his hard-knock characters with hard-knock life experience. 'He's added this quality of having lived a complicated life that is now embedded in his performance, along with his incredible good looks and his soulfulness and his charm,' says Carlton Cuse, a showrunner on 'Lost' and the co-creator of 'Colony.' 'It's just another weapon in his actor's arsenal.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. If Holloway resents the myriad movie stars and Oscar winners who have found refuge on the small screen over the past decade – making it all the harder for TV veterans to book rich roles – he hides it well. 'It makes sense to me,' he muses, 'just because that's where the creativity went. I mean, it's the golden age of TV.' 'I'm super sappy and goofy, but people have an image of me as, like, this cool guy,' Holloway says. 'I can lean into that cliché, but who I am is actually the other guy.' Photo by James Van Evers/Max Toning down the swagger and ramping up the silliness during a mid-May video chat from a New York hotel, the bespectacled actor is an easy laugh with a grin that persists through touchy topics. Far from tech savvy, he cautions people that he leaves his phone at home and might take 48 hours to respond to a text. ('It drives my friends and family crazy,' he concedes. 'I'm not of this era.') Raising an 11-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter with his wife, Yessica, in Southern California, he gleefully rattles off his responsibilities in the Holloway household – 'the Uber service, the cook, the maid, the freaking laundry guy' – and asserts that being a present father is his most cherished role. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. 'I'm super sappy and goofy, but people have an image of me as, like, this cool guy,' Holloway says. 'I can lean into that cliché, but who I am is actually the other guy.' His 'Duster' co-star Hilson confirms as much. 'If you meet Josh, you'll probably within the first five minutes hear him talk about his kids and his wife,' she says. 'That's just who he is. I think we find ourselves drawn to this edgy character because he just brings to it this natural softness.' Holloway's Jim has been a mafia wheelman for decades when we meet him in 'Duster,' whose eight-episode first season runs through July 3. Bloody and breezy, raunchy and groovy – the series traverses tones while serving as a 1970s travelogue with pit stops involving Elvis Presley, Howard Hughes, Watergate and other period-appropriate touchstones. Whether he's chauffeuring goons, procuring blackmail material or trafficking illicit goods, Jim rarely sheds his devil-may-care mantra. But the character remains haunted by his brother's death years earlier and the discovery that their boss may have been responsible for the hit. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. 'Even though he is obviously an incredibly handsome guy, there is a kind of sadness and anger under the wry and comedic surface,' Abrams says over email. '[Jim] has to be carefree and cool and funny and daring, but he also needs to be broken: someone who stopped evolving at a certain point, someone who is being challenged to wake up, reflect and be held accountable in his life.' Despite that heavy backstory, Holloway assures that playing Jim is mostly a blast – starting with the stunts. After attending Rick Seaman's stunt-driving school, Holloway shifted to lessons with driver Chris Peterson and learned 'every stunt in the book.' Asked whether he's taken those skills out in public, Holloways chuckles. 'I'd be doing that every day,' he says, 'but the computers are, like, anti-skid and this and that, and they just won't let you do it.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Then there's the opportunity to deploy his innate allure. Take a scene in 'Duster' in which Jim heads to a hospital and asks for the status of a gravely wounded patient he would rather not see pull through. Told by a female employee that such information is confidential, Jim flicks his hair, tilts his head and coolly replies, 'Then just give it to me confidentially.' Informed the man's outlook is dire, Jim smirks. 'Darling,' he says, 'you just made my day.' It's an ominous scene that, in Holloway's hands, plays as effortlessly suave. 'I grew up in a time where if you wanted to date, you had to flirt,' he explains through sheepish laughter. 'It wasn't on a gadget. You had to go out there and ask out girls and have some game.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. As showrunner Morgan puts it, Holloway constantly 'borrows from himself' on screen. Referencing Steve McQueen in 'Bullitt' and Walter Matthau in 'The Bad News Bears,' Morgan says she and Abrams leaned into Holloway's inherent appeal when writing Jim. 'We thought about characters that you want to spend a lot of time with,' Morgan says. 'Josh just brings that warmth.' Holloway acknowledges that every character he plays is a color from his kaleidoscopic persona. Raised in rural Georgia, he tried a slew of professions – construction, restaurateuring and modeling, among them – before giving acting a whirl. When he took a class from Corey Allen and the 'Rebel Without a Cause' actor preached the perks of channeling such experiences on screen, Holloway lit up. 'I'd just had a lot of life experience already to draw on,' he says. 'That's what it was: I want to do everything, so I'm an actor.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Although 'Lost's' Sawyer was deemed one of the show's least popular characters in audience testing, Cuse says the actor's deep-seated pathos led the writers to reimagine him as a reluctant hero. By the time the mystery-box series concluded in 2010, Sawyer was a fan favourite. 'That was a really satisfying arc,' Cuse says, 'that was only made possible because of what Josh had inside.' Riding the wave of 'Lost's' success, Holloway turned down a slew of network TV procedurals in hopes that a movie career would take off. After booking minor roles in the 2011 blockbuster 'Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,' the 2013 thriller 'Paranoia' and the 2014 action flick 'Sabotage,' Holloway grew impatient with big-budget film shoots and longed for television's expediency. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. 'I always had two or three jobs at once since I was 11 years old,' Holloway says. 'I did a couple of movies, and I was so bored because you'd sit around so long. On TV, you just go to your trailer to change and that is it – you're back on set, and they're busting your butt.' That's not to say Holloway is done with film: He recently shot supporting roles in the musical 'Reimagined' and the crime drama 'He Bled Neon' and will topline an indie adaptation of the Louis L'Amour novel 'Flint' that shoots this summer. But after spending a decade between movie gigs, Holloway acknowledges that he's built more for the TV grind than the big-screen machine. After biding his time before 'Duster,' Holloway is relishing one more spin in the driver's seat. 'I'm a workhorse,' he says with a shrug. 'That's my character.' Toronto & GTA Sunshine Girls Tennis Sunshine Girls NFL
Washington Post
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Lost for seven years, Josh Holloway is back in the driver's seat
Josh Holloway was stranded in a Hollywood wasteland five years ago when the phone rang. It was J.J. Abrams, and he was offering a route out of the figurative desert — by way of a literal one. The third and final season of the Holloway-starring series 'Colony' had aired more than a year earlier. Freshly 50, Holloway accepted that the dystopian drama was probably his last leading-man gig. If the offer came to play, say, a leading man's father? He'd be there. But that wasn't happening, either.
Daily Mail
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Lost star RETURNS after 'hard' seven years away from spotlight
The actor who portrayed the hunky bad boy James 'Sawyer' Ford in Lost has opened up about his career resurgence after a 'hard' seven years away from showbusiness. Josh Holloway - who appeared at the Duster premiere last week - is currently working on four different projects including the aforementioned HBO series but things have not been easy in his post-Lost career. When asked by The Hollywood Reporter if this was his career resurgence, he replied: 'Yeah. It's interesting. I must have thrown the penny over the wrong shoulder and broke a mirror while I did it, because 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.' After starring as Will Bowman on the series Colony which aired from 2016 to 2018, he has not had very many consistent roles as he has had a few guest starring spots on television, most notably on Yellowstone over 10 episodes from 2020 to 2021. He continued: 'I started telling my agents, "Just bring me work, I need to get out of house, it's ridiculous, I only work for the Holloways now and I need to do something." The actor who portrayed the hunky bad boy James 'Sawyer' Ford in Lost has opened up about his career resurgence after a 'hard' seven years away from showbusiness; he is pictured on Lost 'They started sending me random scripts. A lot of them that were not good projects that I had to pass on, but some came through.' He is reuniting with a familiar face in his new project Duster as Lost creator and showrunner JJ Abrams also created this new Max series along with LaToya Morgan. In it he stars alongside Rachel Hilson as she plays Nina Hayes who is the FBI's first Black woman agent working to stop a crime syndicate with the assistance of Josh's character who is a talented getaway driver named Jim Ellis. The first episode of the series can now be streamed on Max as it also stars Keith David, Sydney Elisabeth, Greg Grunber, Camille Guaty, Corbin Bernsen, Gail O'Grady, and Donal Logue. Meanwhile, Josh portrayed fan favorite character Sawyer through the entirety of the Lost series as his character was known for his rural Southern accent, selfishness, machismo, and folksy use of oft-abrasive nicknames belied his sophisticated and tender sides as an avid reader and a caring lover. The American science fiction adventure drama series made its first debut in September 2004 and its sixth, and final, season aired in May 2010, with a total of 121 episodes. The show follows the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815, who each had their own dark secret, as they attempt to survive on a mysterious deserted island in the middle of the ocean after their flight from Sydney to Los Angeles crashed. However, it's not just the characters who are hiding things, and the island has its own unknown mysteries too such as underground bunkers, a secret research project called Dharma Initiative and other violent survivors to fight off, terrifyingly known as 'The Others'. As well as having supernatural and science fiction elements, the show featured several romance storylines, especially fugitive Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly) who found herself in a love triangle between dishy surgeon Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) and Holloway's character Sawyer. Lost also had several legendary characters, who soon became fan favorites, such as Jorge Garcia's character Hurley and wise survival expert, John Locke (Terry O'Quinn), who had previously been in a wheelchair after a broken back but found he was able to walk again on the mysterious island. Each episode would predominantly feature a flashback, present day and flash-forward sequence for each character, giving fans context as to why they behaved in such a certain way and what dark secret they were hiding. However, the season six ending left viewers split - with some delighted and others confounded, as fans sparked the theory that all the characters had been dead all along. The season six finale revealed that despite all the events on the island being true, the characters' flash-sideways timeline was in fact a limbo in the afterlife, otherwise known as purgatory. After meeting each other on the island, each person was able to learn from their survival journey and move on to the afterlife. One of the last poignant scenes showed all the survivors reunited in church as they all passed on together. While the final shot mirrored the first episode where character Jack was lying on the sand with his Golden Retriever dog running towards him, he closed his eyes for one last time.
Time of India
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Cannes 2025: K-Drama queens Kim Go Eun and Han So Hee to attend film festival
The 78th Cannes International Film Festival has begun, and fans—particularly those who enjoy Korean dramas—are enthusiastic. While some are unhappy by the lack of Korean films in the main competition, two well-known Korean actors, Kim Go Eun and Han So Hee, will nevertheless walk the famous red carpet. The festival will take place from May 13 to 24, 2025, and according to an exclusive report by Naver, both actresses will attend as brand ambassadors, representing the major brands they endorse. When will Kim Go Eun and Han So Hee attend? Kim Go Eun will walk the red carpet on May 14, the second day of the Cannes Film Festival. She is anticipated to make an impression as the global ambassador for a well-known coffee capsule machine brand. Han So Hee, on the other hand, will make a red carpet appearance to represent the luxury companies she favors. Both stars are preparing to demonstrate not just their individual star power, but also their worldwide influence on the international stage. More Korean entertainment at Cannes Film Festival 2025 One of this year's festival's most anticipated South Korean productions is Colony, directed by Yeon Sang Ho of Train to Busan and starring Ji Chang Wook and Jun Ji Hyun. The only Korean film officially admitted to the festival this year is the short film First Summer, directed by Heo Gayoung and selected for the La Cinef segment. In addition, Jung Yoomi's short animated film Glasses has been selected for Critics' Week, one of the festival's parallel sections. However, for the third year in a row, no Korean films have entered the main competition. Nonetheless, Korea will have a representative on the jury panel, with acclaimed filmmaker Hong Sangsoo serving on the competition jury.
Time of India
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
'Train to Busan' Director Yeon Sang Ho set to release the new thriller ‘Colony'; the project hits the Cannes sales launch
From the director of 'Train to Busan' comes another action and thriller film that still follows a similar biological horror concept. The film has officially entered the Cannes market and is all set for release by next year. 'Colony' features a powerful star cast The film 'Colony' is currently in production and set to be released in 2026. The cast features some of the best and most sought-after names in the Korean entertainment industry. The cast features Gianna Jun , Koo Kyo Hwan , Ji Chang Wook , and Shin Hyun Been in the main roles, with many others to follow in supporting roles. The film is currently being produced by some of the biggest studios and media houses and will be distributed through an online movie streaming platform from South Korea. Sales launch along with Hong Kong FilMart The announcement of the Cannes sales launch has come alongside the streaming platform's lineup at the Hong Kong FilMart . FilMart is Hong Kong's very own international film and TV market, where 'Colony's' streaming platform has presented a powerful lineup of projects. Some of the most renowned additions to the market have been 'Taboo: The Silent Day', which follows a set of friends in Bali who make the mistake of breaking an urn during Bali's sacred Day of Silence, turning their holiday into a nightmare. More additions include 'Big Deal', 'Once We Were Us', 'The Verdict', and 'White Blast'. About the new project 'Colony' 'Colony' is another action-packed thriller that follows the plotline of a genetically mutating virus. It features a biotechnology conference that ends up turning deadly as a mutating virus is released in the building. In order to contain the situation and quarantine the virus, government officials seal the building off from the rest of the world. The major twist comes from the survivors that are still trapped inside with the infected and how they deal with the situation.
