" I didn't want [Charlie] to necessarily be stuck on the beach taking care of the baby — who I love; one of my favorite days on Lost is working with the baby — but I didn't want him to be Surrogate Dad. Charlie was the first guy to kill an Other. He was the first guy to step up and go, ''F--- you guys. If you're gonna mess with us, we're gonna mess with you.'' And I thought, ''I don't want to see this character become neutered. I want him to step up in his life.'' I was always saying to Damon, ''My dream for Charlie was for him to go off on his own into the jungle and go renegade — steal off into the jungle with a gun and learn about life himself...'' "
I had this dream not so long ago. And in the dream Charlie was off the island. He survived the whole ordeal and he was with his old band. And they were going, ''F---, man, we didn't know where you were!'' And they sat around the table and he told them the whole story, and they were like, ''What? You got hung from a tree? And you killed a guy? And you got chased by a polar bear?!?'' They were laughing and joking about it — kind of like that English sensibility: ''F---ing A, you killed a guy?!?'' And at the end of it Charlie said something like, ''After all that crap that happened, it was fun. It was the adventure of my life.'' And later on, I thought, ''That's interesting, because maybe that wasn't Charlie — maybe that was me thinking about when all this ends: Hell, I was hung from a tree, I was beaten up, I nearly drowned, I got chased by a polar bear. But it was a great adventure, and that's all you can ask for not only in work, but in life.''
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