^^ i read this in the ny post the other day:
NY POST/By DON KAPLAN
ONLY echoes of Mr. Eko remain, after the hulking black priest of "Lost"
was torn apart by a monster last night.
The show had intended to kill off the enigmatic character from the
beginning, according to tvguide.com.
"We actually had a plan in place" when the actor who played Eko,
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, 39, joined the cast last season, says
executive producer Carlton Cuse.
"When Adewale came on the show, he didn't want to make a long-term
commitment to a series.
"We love him and so we agreed that he would come on the show and then
we would find a time in which his arc would come to an end.
"We sort of felt, after a lot of conversations with him. . . we wanted
to work on a deal for him to come back and that we would finish his
character somewhere in the [first] six episodes" this fall.
Among the many "Lost" mysteries, Mr. Eko's was one of the strangest.
He was an African ex-drug lord-turned-self-annointed priest who was
sitting in the tail section of the doomed airliner that crashed on the
strange island where the show unfolds.
Rumblings from the set of "Lost" say that Akinnuoye-Agbaje developed a
reputation for being difficult to work with.
Some cast members complained about him to producers, according to a
story appearing in an upcoming edition of TV Guide.
At times, he is said have have refused to film some scenes as scripted,
insisting on rewrites, and even demanded to be released from his
contract on several occasions.
"We would never let that kind of thing determine the creative direction
of the show," series co-creator Damon Lindelof says. "We're all in
service of the story."
In real life, Akinnuoye-Agbaje was also among the many actors on the
show who have grabbed headlines for various driving infractions in
Hawaii where the show is filmed.
In his case, the charges were eventually dropped. Akinnuoye-Agbaje's
run-in with law had little to do with his leaving the show, producers
say.