What Happened To The Actor Who Played Sawyer On Lost?

On September 22, 2004, ABC aired the pilot of Lost, a primetime drama that would go on to become a mainstream phenomenon – winning ten Emmys over its six-year run – and changed the lives of an ensemble cast that included little-known actor Josh Holloway. A former model and struggling actor, Holloway had spent years toiling away in Hollywood, trying to get his career off the ground. After contemplating quitting acting altogether a few different times, he got his big break when Lost hit the small screen, became an immediate primetime smash, and shot him to television stardom. 

Josh Holloway went from being anonymous to being on the cover of every magazine under the sun. Starring in a critical and commercial smash completely altered the course of his career trajectory, but what exactly happened to Holloway after the whirlwind success of Lost ended? What does an actor who struggled to book guest roles do after the gleam of his big break wears off? Here's what happened to Josh Holloway after he stopped playing Sawyer on Lost.

In 1993, Josh Holloway had a huge break in the form of an Aerosmith music video for "Cryin'" starring opposite Alicia Silverstone. Playing a purse-snatching dreamboat dressed in an all-black outfit that screams early '90s, Holloway is eventually chased down and jump kicked to the curb by Silverstone's main character. It truly is a "blink and you'll miss it" appearance, but it gave Holloway a minute taste of the Hollywood lifestyle. After years of failing to break into the industry, he was lucky enough to eventually start grabbing roles in shows like Angel, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and Walker, Texas Ranger. 

Before truly hitting the big time with Lost, the most significant project Holloway was a part of was the 2002 Sci-Fi original movie Sabretooth, where he starred in a lead role opposite David Keith and John Rhys-Davies. His struggles were so significant, he almost quit acting to become a realtor in 2004. Later that very year, Holloway's career would really take off into the stratosphere.

After a decade of small roles, Holloway was thrust into the public eye, going from bit part actor and model to full-blown television mainstay overnight. Being a star on of one of television's biggest shows led to a fame that must have been a culture shock. In a 2010 Vanity Fair interview, Holloway said, "I could completely do without the fame. It makes me self-conscious. It is a responsibility. I believe that if people look up to you in any way, especially kids, then you have a responsibility to inspire them, both in your work and in your life. So, for me, that is a weight." 

The late bloomer became a resident hunk on the cover of supermarket tabloids in the mid-2000s: From 2005 to 2007, People magazine named Holloway one of the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World," In Touch Weekly named Holloway the "hottest hunk" on television, and he made the top ten list of TV Guide's Sexiest Stars. All of this notoriety could have gone to Holloway's head; luckily, he had a strong partner to fall back on during this monumental change in his life.

One might think becoming a household name overnight would do wonders for Holloway's acting career, but that certainly wasn't the case, at least not at first. From the time Lost began shooting in 2004 to when it ended in 2010, Holloway only starred in two other projects: 2007 low-budget horror film Whisper and the 2009 comedy Stay Cool. It isn't hard to see why this was the case, as Holloway and his family spent eight to nine months a year in Hawaii while he was shooting Lost. Being outside of the mainland United States for three-fourths of the year is not very conducive to finding other roles. It didn't help that both Whisper and Stay Cool were little-seen, poorly-regarded films that might have done more harm to Holloway's acting clout than good. Holloway would have to wait until Lost officially ended to start flexing his hard-won celebrity into more roles.

After Lost ended in 2010, Holloway seemed poised to take more time-intensive roles as his schedule became much less crowded. Holloway would take roles in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, Paranoia, and Sabotage, the kinds of films starring big name actors that can build a career into something special. However, his parts in these films were supporting (at best); his only major starring role in a picture from 2010-2015 would be the lead in Battle of the Year: The Dream Team, which managed a whopping 6 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. (If you've never heard of it, here's the trailer... it really is worth a watch, if only to see Josh Holloway starring in a 3D dance film with Josh Peck and Chris Brown.) Finding appealing film opportunities increasingly hard to come by, Holloway would eventually pivot back to the small screen, returning to television in 2014. 

Spending years trying to recapture the success Lost brought to his career, Holloway would finally find another winning project in Colony, a science fiction drama that ran on USA Network for three seasons. Though it never managed to capture a large audience, Colony was a cult hit that was generally successful with critics, even managing to garner three straight Saturn Awards nominations for "Best Science Fiction Television Series" in 2016, 2017 and 2018. 

Colony is set in a dystopian version of Los Angeles, where residents live under military occupation by the Transitional Authority, an organization serving an extraterrestrial group referred to as the "Hosts." Host policy is enforced by militarized police called Homeland Security and nicknamed the "Redhats." Holloway starred as Will Bowman, a former U.S. Army Ranger and FBI Special Agent who starts reluctantly working for the Redhats hunting down Resistance members in order to save his missing son.

With his role in Yellowstone and his signing with industry heavy-hitter United Talent Agency in 2019, it's safe to say the future is looking bright for Josh Holloway. According to persistent rumors, ABC is apparently interested in bringing Lost back from the dead to satiate all those fans who were let down by the ending. According to Entertainment Tonight, network president Karey Burke expressed a desire to revisit the drama after a video compilation of past and present network shows played before a room of reporters at a Television Critics Association press tour. It's hard to fathom a show with a cast that large getting a full-fledged relaunch, but nothing is ever out of the realm of possibility in television. If Lost does come back, providing the legions of diehard fans with even more content to obsess over, the showrunners may have a hard time pulling Holloway away from whatever project he lines up next.