Harold Perrineau isn’t one to stay silent. Apparently, that personality trait got him in trouble with his bosses on the show Lost because he said he was fired for speaking his mind. He recently explained exactly how that went down.
In a far-reaching and deep-diving Vanity Fair article about the show’s “poisonous culture,” Perrineau, who played Michael on Lost, said he read the second episode of the second season and felt it was “too much.” At that point in the show, Michael’s son Walt was kidnapped by the Others, and Michael gets rescued by Sawyer.
Perrineau said that Michael asked Sawyer a lot of questions about the past, but only mentions his son once. He didn’t like how the showrunners wrote the character with such little concern for his son.
“I can’t be another person who doesn’t care about missing Black boys, even in the context of fiction, right? This is just furthering the narrative that nobody cares about Black boys, even Black fathers.” Perrineau was aware of how he was going to come off, because no one wants to hear about those kinds of issues — or at least they didn’t back then.
“Any time you mention race, everybody gets—their hair gets on fire, and they’re like, ‘I’m not racist!’ It’s like, ‘Nope. Because I say that I’m Black doesn’t mean I’m calling you a racist. I am talking to you from my perspective. I’m being really clear that I’m not trying to put my trauma on you, but I am trying to talk to you about what I feel. So can we just do that? Can we just have that conversation?’”
Perrineau said he just wanted what he was promised when he signed on to do the show: Equity. “At the beginning, it was, ‘Hey, Harold, we love you. We love what you’re creating in the industry. We really want you and what you do,’” Perrineau said.
However, he was frustrated by the lack of depth his character was given when compared to other characters. He expressed his frustration with his higher-ups:
“If you’re going to use me, let’s work. I’m here to work. I’m good at my job and I’ll do anything you want. Except be ‘the Black guy’ on your show.”
He said he asked for “more lines that show he cares about his son,” and when that didn’t happen, he ad-libbed them. “I didn’t give a s**t at that point,” he said.
A few weeks later, a revised script came in, and Perrineau was forced to film the new scenes in only two days.
“It was 14-hour, 18-hour days. I was like, ‘If you think I’m gonna f**k this up, I’m not. I’m gonna be really good.’ But I felt like suddenly, they were mad at me,” Perrineau said. His premonition was right. He was fired a little before the second season finale. He said one of the showrunners told him, “Well, you said you don’t have enough work here, so we’re letting you go.”
Perrineau said they didn’t like how he kept speaking out. “It was all very much, ‘How dare you?'”