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Can you imagine Lost’s Sawyer without his signature southern drawl? It turns out we almost got a completely different version of the character. When J.J. Abrams was developing Lost, he envisioned the conman as a sharp-dressed man from upstate New York. What changed? Enter Josh Holloway.

“Originally, he was from Buffalo. A Prada wearing slick conman from Buffalo, NY,” Josh Holloway says during a panel at Florida Supercon.

Holloway wasn’t keen on doing a New York accent, so he opted to ignore it. “What, am I going to go, ‘[NY accent] Yo, yo, yo, here I am from New York. I am on the island. This sucks man.’ So I was like, ‘Don’t do that.’ So, I was just going to go in with no accent and try that. And then the first day of work was with J.J. Abrams, he was directing that pilot. He was like, ‘It sounds like you’re trying to hide an accent.’ I was like, ‘Well, yeah. I’m supposed to be from Buffalo, and I’m obviously not.’ He was like, ‘Where are you from.’ I was like, ‘Georgia.’ He’s like, ‘You’re from Georgia.’ And he set me free on the first day. That’s the first time I’ve heard that in my entire career in Hollywood, to lean into your accent.”

Sawyer’s character was rewritten to be a native of Jasper, Alabama, and Holloway was able to lean into his real accent. Thank goodness, because I have a hard time imagining how all six seasons of Lost would’ve gone if we had gotten a Sawyer with a New York accent.

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