This is the shorter online version posted 17 August 2005.

Cover Date: August 29, 2005 / No. 705

Dominic Monaghan
British actor Dominic Monaghan (The Lord of the Rings), 28, plays a recovering junkie rock star marooned on a spooky island in TV's Lost. With the dramatic series finale airing on Aug. 25, Monaghan finds himself with Di Webster.

Posted Aug. 17, 2005
BY DI WEBSTER

Now, let's see … you're an unmarried actor and surfer from Manchester, you get a role in a hit TV show taped in Hawaii and you travel the world with your beautiful co-star (Evangeline Lilly). Were you Mother Teresa in a former life?
(Laughs) I don't really know what I've done right. I'm very happy in my job and what I do, and I do feel very blessed and I try not to take it for granted that much. I'm very big on the pursuit of happiness, you know, getting myself happy then making other people around me happy, so I wonder if maybe that balances out everything else that goes on in my life.

And yours is the one character the producers have vowed never to kill off. Yeah, that's true. They did say that. I think certainly if I was to misbehave myself too much those things would change. In the very early days (executive producers) J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof said I wasn't going to die, but they also hung me from a tree. I don't think anyone's really indestructible on this show. Maybe the dog …

Well, if you guys get hungry … Yeah, I would have eaten the dog by now if it was me (laughs), but everyone seems to be very dog-friendly on the show. Does the Lost cast ever catch a plane en masse?
(Laughs) Well, I've been flying recently with Matthew Fox and Evangeline because we did this European tour and we do get some funny looks. I remember when the show became a hit in America, Matthew and I flew back to LA for some weekend work and there were some worried people on our flight. People now assume we're responsible for bringing down a 747.

I hear the cast have nicknames. Evangeline's is Monkey because she's a good tree-climber. What's yours?
I don't really have one. There's only a few nicknames that go around the cast. Matthew Fox is called Foxy, which is pretty self-explanatory. I call Malcolm, the boy on the show, Little M.

You've got about 27 first names, so Dom is almost a nickname.
Dominic Bernard Patrick Luke Monaghan, named after both my parents and my confirmation name. I was and still am obsessed by Star Wars, so I wanted my confirmation name to be Han. My mum and dad said, "No," so I said, "Can it be Chewbacca?" and they said, "No," so then I said, "OK, I'll have it be Luke." And they said, "You only want it to be Luke because of Luke Skywalker!" And I said, "No, I very much enjoyed the writings of Luke in the gospel," so they said, "All right, you can have Luke."

Why did you run away from Paul McCartney at an Oscar party?
It's kind of complex. In the same way that people believe in God or believe in Buddha, I believe in the Beatles - like I believe in them as a way of living my life and an idea of how I should be. John Lennon, especially. Paul McCartney would probably be second. I just didn't want him to disappoint me. I didn't want it to be me saying, "Nice to meet you," and he says, "You too," and I walk away going, "Wow, that was how I interacted with the closest thing to Lennon or the closest thing to what I see as a deity." So he came over to meet (lotr director) Pete Jackson and Elijah (Wood) and I was at the table and Pete, who's also a big Beatles fan, said, "Stay here, Paul McCartney's coming over." And I said, "No, no, no, I'm going." And I just ran off. I couldn't do it.

For more, see the Aug. 29, 2005 issue of Who Magazine

http://web.archive.org/web/20070811044301/http://www.who.com/who/magazine/article/0,19636,7401050829-1095411,00.html