Lost for seven years, Josh Holloway is back in driver’s seat in Duster

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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.

“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.)

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.

By the time “Duster” premiered this month 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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

“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.

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

“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.”