Iowa connection found on ‘Lost’

Jeremy Davies plays Daniel Faraday on "Lost." (AP photo, ABC)

“Lost,”  which airs its 100^th episode on Wednesday, April 29, has two well-documented Iowa connections:  Kate (played by Evangeline Lilly) is from the Hawkeye State (cue the twangy country music that ALWAYS plays in her flashbacks), and Michael Emerson, who plays Ben, was born in Cedar Rapids and grew up in Toledo.

But there is a third, not-so-well-known connection:  Jeremy Davies, who portrays physicist Daniel Faraday, the only person on the island who apparently has a clue about time travel, lived briefly in Iowa in the 1980s, during his late teens.

Davies, 39, is the son of children’s author and educator Mel Boring.  (Davies is the actor’s mother’s maiden name.) Jeremy’s parents divorced when he was young, and he lived with his mother in Kansas. After she died in the 1970s, he went to live with his father in California. In 1986, the Borings moved to Rockford, Iowa, which is about 10 miles southeast of Mason City.

According to biographies, he graduated from high school while living in Iowa and was manager of the school’s 1988 basketball team.

Once out of high school, he moved to California, attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena, and worked his way up through TV commercials and bit parts on TV.

See the TV commercial for Subaru that put him on the road to success here.

Until “Lost,” he was perhaps best known for his role as Cpl. Timothy Upham, the interpreter, in “Saving Private Ryan.” And if you think that scruffy beard and haunting eyes make him look like Charles Manson, you aren’t the only one:  He was cast as Manson in a TV production of “Helter Skelter” in 2004. 

Oh, by the way, he’s hot. That’s the consensus of a video and musical tribute you can see here.

  

More about his dad

• Davies’ father had a public presence in Iowa that extended beyond his non-fiction children’s books and author visits to schools, where he was known to dress up as the Cat in the Hat.
• In 1992, Boring ran as an independent in an unsuccessful attempt to unseat U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican.
• In 2004, according to the Mason City Globe Gazette, Boring bought his first television set so he could watch his son in “Helter Skelter.”
• Boring and his second wife lived in Rockford for 20 years and then moved to Washington state. He died in September 2008.