Aussie Twist To Us Hit

Illawarra Mercury

Thursday February 17, 2005

GLEN HUMPHRIES

LOST,

Tonight: Prime, 8.30pm

Tonight's episode of Lost features an interesting special effect - it turns Hawaii into rural Victoria.

Australian actor Nick Tate appears as a farmer called Ray in a series of flashbacks involving crash survivor Kate - a woman with a shady past.

Tate says the scenes meant to be rural Victoria were actually shot in Hawaii - the filming location for the series.

He's hoping the rest of the world won't notice the red soil of Hawaii more closely resembles Queensland and not Victoria.

At least in the scenes where Tate's character is driving Kate (played by Evangeline Lilly), his car is on the proper side of the road for Australia. But there was a bit of trickery there too - he was filmed driving on the right and the frame was later flipped.

"We filmed it in America, as if it was in Hawaii, but they were able to laterally invert it to make it look like it was Australia," Tate says.

"My character, they had to swap the wedding ring on my right hand, so when the filming was flipped it would look like it was on my left hand."

Tate got the one-episode gig by chance. He was in New York with his wife and daughter to watch his son in Othello.

He'd told his agent he wasn't working - after making a promise to his daughter he'd stay in Australia for a year.

But the agent rang back with the offer to meet the producers of Lost.

"I told (my daughter) about it and she said, 'Dad you probably won't get it anyway, why don't you go and meet them?'," Tate says.

"So I flew back to LA and there was a lot of Aussie actors there because it was a pretty coveted thing to be involved with.

"Lo and behold, they offered me the role. I flew to Hawaii and my daughter and wife flew back to Australia. They were kind of pleased and miffed at the same time."

The show was still new when Tate signed on. His is actually the first episode - the two we've already seen in Australia were the pilot episode split in half.

Even at that early stage, he could tell it was going to be quite a success.

"Yeah, absolutely, you can smell it on some shows," he says.

"You walk on and you get a sense of whether they know what they're doing or not.

"Apparently, the talk is they spent $14 million Australian on the pilot alone, so you knew they weren't sparing any expense.

"The others (from the pilot) came back after a few months to film the first episode and there was this tremendous sense of excitement and anticipation that they were embarking on a wonderful history-making thing for television."

© 2005 Illawarra Mercury

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