‘Lost” star Harold Perrineau is vowing to “think more before I say things” in the wake of an interview in which he said racism had something to do with the death of his character on last week’s season finale.
“Listen, if I’m being really candid, there are all these questions about how [the producers] respond to black people on the show,” Perrineau said in an interview with tvguide.com. “Sayid [Naveen Andrews] gets to meet Nadia [Andrea Gabriel] and Desmond [Henry Ian Cusick] and Penny [Sonya Walger] hook up again. But a little black boy and his father hooking up, that wasn’t interesting?”
In last week’s two-hour season finale, Perrineau’s character, Michael Dawson, perished in an explosion, leaving his son, Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) an orphan.
“Walt just winds up being another fatherless child,” he told TV Guide. “It plays into a really big, weird stereotype and, being a black person myself, that wasn’t so interesting.”
But yesterday, Perrineau’s publicist hastily arranged an emergency interview with Entertainment Weekly to control the damage.
“I should probably think more before I say things,” Perrineau told EW. “I should especially think before I say anything racial, because I recognize that when you make a racial comment it polarizes people.”
“Lost” executive producer Carlton Cuse defended his show’s diversity. “We pride ourselves on having a very racially diverse cast,” he told TV Guide.