Maggie Grace, whose spoiled rich Shannon Rutherford died tragically in Season 2 of “Lost,” is still heartbroken 20 years later that she was written off the show.
Now 40, the actress said in a new interview with Independent that “it’s still the worst heartbreak of my career. I was devastated!”
“I thought they were going to take her a little further,” she said of her character, who had matured after the crash and losing stepbrother Boone (played by Ian Somerhalder, the first of the main cast to be killed off).
But she has a theory why Shannon, who had just started a romance with Naveen Andrews’ sexy Iraqi Sayid — had to go. “She was sort of a caricature of white privilege before that was a phrase, you know? And maybe I was just too good at my assigned job of being incredibly annoying.”
Grace, who went on to star in the “Taken” films, as well as “Fear the Walking Dead” series, added that she’d hoped that Shanon would “at the last moment, redeem herself and be incredibly self-sacrificial in some way. I guess there were flashes of it, but not in the way I hoped in terms of an arc.”
Even though her time on the Emmy-winning series was brief, Grace still experienced the overnight fame along with the lesser-known members of the cast. (More established actors like “Lord of the Rings” star Dominic Monaghan had already been there.)
“I feel for the cast of, like, ‘Twilight’ or anything else where [they] are suddenly thrust into the spotlight when you feel very ill-prepared,” she added. “It’s a lot at that age, but I think the fact that I was the baby of the cast [helped].”
She added that, despite the poor timing of her character’s exit, she’s grateful that “Lost” debuted before social media. “That was an enormous blessing for everyone’s mental health. And the concept of the show being popular was just this vague, fuzzy, sort of ‘Oh, that’s nice,’” Grace laughed.
Despite the show’s massive popularity, filming on location in the jungles of Hawaii was like “this little theater troupe,” she explained.