Matthew Fox Warner Brothers
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Last week SI writer Richard Deitsch interviewed Matthew Fox for the magazine's Q&A. The 40-year-old actor (Lost) plays former Marshall assistant football coach Red Dawson in We Are Marshall, which opens on Dec. 22. Here are additional excerpts from their conversation:

SI: Red Dawson was an assistant on the 1970 team, but he wasn't with the team when its plane crashed, killing 75 people on board, because he was on a recruiting trip. You invited him to meet you in Hawaii before filming. Did he have reservations about flying?

Fox: I invited him because I was shooting Lost and there was no way I could go to Huntington, W. Va. [where the movie was filmed]. I anticipated him not wanting to come, and I obviously understood. He has not done very much flying for 35 years. I was asking a lot of him, and I was blown away when he decided to come.

SI: Did he know who you were?

Fox: He didn't know who I was, and I loved that. I felt it was my responsibility to earn his trust. I think that's what we did in Hawaii. We just spent four or five days together. He met my family. He had dinner with us. He hung out with my kids. He is a man who has not spoken much about this for 35 years and he's had a hard time dealing with it. He had been carrying a lot inside. He's really sort of iconic in that strong and silent way of dealing with intense emotion and grief. So I felt the most important thing was just to get know each other as guys and find the places that we had a lot in common. It turned out that we just had a lot in common. We were raised with similar priorities and ways of looking at life. We both have a real love for football and fishing and the outdoors. We just bonded and after about a day we both realized that we really liked each other.

SI: Have you asked him what he thought of the film?

Dawson: He called me right way. He said he was blown away. He's very happy. Red being Red, it was hard for him to express what he thought, but I know he's really happy about how it came out. And that meant everything to me.

SI: How did the town respond to the film being made?

Fox: On one hand, the people in Huntington were like, 'Wow, finally, our story is going to be told.' On the other hand, they were fairly suspicious of a bunch of Hollywood people coming in to exploit this story, and totally mess it up.