I’m going to ask you a lot of questions about Lost because it was my favorite television show. What did you make of the character you were playing, Jin, initially when you read the scripts?

I was concerned. As an actor who had been around the block a bit, my biggest fear was shooting the pilot episode and then having the show get canceled, because we wouldn’t really get to watch this character develop. And where the character starts isn’t a great place in terms of cultural representation. He was an overbearing male stereotype.

The relationship between Sun and Jin wasn’t explored very deeply in the pilot, given the number of characters that were being introduced. So right way, I had a conversation with Damon [Lindelof]. He assured me the character was going to grow and that he was going to deepen, and that what we saw in the pilot wasn’t going to be what we were going to get for the entirety of the series. I put my trust in him, and thankfully he was good to his word. Through six seasons, you watched Jin evolve arguably more than any other character on the show, and that’s what made it so satisfying to play him.

So much happens in the first season. When the light comes on in the hatch to end season one, did you know where that storyline was going?

I didn’t know. We would see Damon and Carlton [Cuse, the show's screenwriter], and the first thing we would ask was: What’s going on, who’s in the hatch, what’s in the hatch? They were coy about it. Which is okay. Because when you think about life, you really don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, or the day after. You can make plans, but there’s no way of knowing for sure what our future’s gonna be. The show reflected life in that way. That was the way I was able to justify not knowing what was going to happen in the future.

How did you feel when Jin and Sun died on the island timeline in season six?

It was bittersweet, but in some ways, it was also very satisfying. It was how his story needed to end. He died for love. He died for his wife. He did it because he made a promise to her that he would never leave her side. That was incredibly moving for me for someone to make that choice, especially when you consider what most of us were thinking about Jin after the first episode of the series.

I feel like even with all the other shows that have come after Lost, no show has come close in terms of fan interest and the Internet wanting to figure out every mystery. Game of Thrones is close, but Lost was still on another level to me.

When Lost happened, we were just on the brink of social media. Twitter wasn’t really happening at the time. There was no Reddit, and podcasts were just becoming a thing. What was happening was Internet forums... Had Lost happened now, I really do think it would have exploded in a way on social media that it couldn’t have at the time when it aired. I do think other shows have taken the baton in terms of fan engagement. The Walking Dead, in many ways, is similar to Lost. It’s a multicultural cast dealing with a post-apocalyptic event. We have questions of survival amidst things that are supernatural. I think Game of Thrones is also similar. Lost really ushered in this era of binge-watching and this notion that social media and the Internet could be more than just a companion piece to the viewing experience on television.