This page includes a list of the main characters in the tv show along with some information about them. The information included only goes to the end of the third season.
Characters (page 1)

James Ford, Sawyer, is played by Josh Holloway.  Sawyer was a con man before the crash and continued his bad habits on the island.  He created quite a stash of stuff from the wreckage and kept it all to himself...unless the right offer came along for something.  When he was eight years old, his mother had an affair with a con man who stole all of their money.  His father shot his mother and then himself, leaving little James a traumatized orphan.  He vowed to find and kill the man that brought ruin to his family: Sawyer.  When he was a older, James started conning people to get by and took on the name of Sawyer because he had become the man he was hunting.  He was in Australia because of a tip that the real Sawyer was living there.  He killed this man, but then found out that he was conned by one of his contacts and the man he sought was still out there.  Sawyer was used to living on his own and doing as he pleased, but on the island he was forced to interact with and rely on other people.  He would rather be by himself enjoying one of the many books he had collected, but he began forming real friendships with the others, especially Kate.  His rough exterior began to break down a little every once in awhile around certain people.  He was still more than willing to create mischief in the group and gain the upper hand, but he found himself actually caring for the well being of some of his fellow survivors.  All of his progress may have been for naught though, as he is in an extremely dark place after he killed the real Sawyer.  His mission in life is over and he doesn't feel any better for it.  If anything he feels even more disgusted with himself and feels as if he is even less worthy of love or friendship than before.

Fugitive Kate Austen is played by Evangeline Lilly.  Kate started running from the law when she killed her step-father Wayne by blowing up her house with him in it.  She killed him because she found out that he was her real father and couldn't stand the knowledge that he was a part of her.  She continued on a life of crime and evading the authorities until she was turned in by a "friend" in Australia.  She was being transported back to the states by a US Marshall that had been chasing her for years.  On the island, the handcuffs she had been wearing were found, but no one suspected her of being the criminal until Jack found her mug shot.  She tried her best to fit in with the group and keep her past behind her, but she had need to run.  She signed up for every trek and search party, and she really wanted a spot on Michael's raft just to keep moving and ensure her safety should they be found and rescued.  While she did kill her father in cold-blood, she isn't a homicidal maniac.  She's a very caring person and made friends on the island, but she is quite capable of taking care of herself as she only had herself to trust while on the run.  She was the only person on the island to try and get to know Sawyer and the two formed a close romantic bond, but she also formed a bond with Jack.  She believes that she should like the respectable doctor, but finds herself drawn to the outcast.  Kate took Sawyer for granted as she tried to regain her standing with Jack, and now that Sawyer is shutting her out, will Kate be forceful enough to pull him out of the dark place that he is in?

Charlie Pace, the former bass player for the rock band Driveshaft, was played by Dominic Monaghan.  Charlie used to be a very religious man until he and his brother Liam got caught up in the rockstar life and drugs.  Driveshaft broke up when Liam decided that his wife and daughter were more important and cleaned himself up.  Charlie continued down the path of self-destruction and Liam wanted to help him out, but Charlie refused.  When the plane crashed, Charlie only had a small bag of heroine with him which would run out eventually.  Locke helped Charlie find his guitar in exchange for the drugs and helped him overcome his addiction.  His self-control was tested by the island though, as there was a planeload of heroine-filled Virgin Mary statues in the jungle.  Charlie collected quite a number of these statues until he was found out by Locke and they were taken away.  Charlie hadn't used any of the drugs, but no one believed him - not even Claire with whom he had become good friends.  She asked him for some space, but he had begun to have dreams about her baby being in peril.  He tried to "save" the baby by kidnapping it twice and was pretty much exiled from the group.  Throughout his whole life, he just wanted a loving family and to be able to take care of someone, but he ended up hurting everyone he loved and they pushed him away.  Whether they liked it or not, Charlie had adopted Claire and Aaron as his family and he would do everything and anything he could to protect them both - even sacrifice himself so they could be rescued.  Desmond had been predicting and intervening in Charlie's death throughout the third season, but once Charlie heard that he had to die to save his family, he accepted his fate and proved that he was a hero.

Mysterious John Locke is played by Terry O'Quinn.  Locke was raised in foster homes his whole life and only met his birth parents well into his adult years.  His mother found him and through her he found his real father, Anthony Cooper.  John and Cooper became good friends and when he learned that his father needed a kidney transplant, Locke offered his right away.  After the surgery, however, Cooper left the hospital and shut John out of his life.  His girlfriend, Helen, tried to help him to let go and move on with his life, but John couldn't do that.  A few years later, Cooper asked for his help.  John couldn't refuse, as he still wanted a relationship with his father, but it cost him a future with Helen.  She turned down his marriage proposal and disappeared from his life, as did his father - that is until Locke confronted him about his con jobs and Cooper threw him out of an eighth story window.  Locke ended up paralyzed from the waist down and working at a box company, but he had plans to turn his life around.  He went to Australia to go on a walkabout, but was sent away because of his disability.  When the plane crashed, he found that he could walk again and he put all of his faith into the island.  He saw every challenge as a test of his faith and that the island would reveal the correct path to him.  He was an excellent tracker, hunter, mentor, father-figure, and friend, and everyone trusted him with their lives.  That is, until Boone was critically injured while helping him and died.  Once he finally opened the hatch and found a button that he had to push every 108 minutes, was injured by the blast doors, and was wrong about trusting Ben, his faith in the island wavered.  It was his idea to not push the button anymore, and he admitted his mistake once it was a bit too late.  Once the hatch was gone, Locke focused on finding himself with the island's help once again.  He does not want to leave the island and set his sights on destroying anything that could jeopardize that.  He was shot by Ben because Ben was scared of Locke's connection to the island, but he was miraculously healed.

Naveen Andrews is Sayid Jarrah, a former communications officer and torturer for the Iraqi Republican Guard.  He was a loyal soldier until the Americans came and forced him to torture his commanding officer.  Sayid was on his way to Los Angeles to find Nadia, the woman that he loved, when the plane crashed.  He had lost contact with her years before when he helped her escape from the military.  He held on to photographs of her and the hope that he would see her once again.  When they crashed on the island, Sayid was doing everything in his power to get them off.  He started the signal fires and put together the trek up the mountain to try and get a distress call out.  None of his efforts seemed to be working though, and he began to feel as if it was worthless to even try.  When it was believed that Sawyer had Shannon's asthma medication, Sayid tied him to a tree and tortured him.  It didn't work and Sayid left the group in shame, vowing to never use that method of interrogation again.  He happened upon Danielle Rousseau and took some of her maps back to the camp with him.  He grew closer to Shannon while trying to decipher the maps and found himself forgetting Nadia.  His heart was broken though, because Shannon was killed by Ana Lucia, but he decided to direct his anger towards the Others instead of Ana.  When Ben was brought to the Hatch, Sayid did not believe his story and beat him badly to get the truth.  He knew that Ben was lying, just as he knew that Michael had been "compromised" by the Others after returning. Sayid is a good judge of character and a loyal friend, and more people on the island began to turn to him when seeking leadership once Jack came back with Juliet.  He was the one that Hurley and Charlie trusted with the news of Naomi, he was the one that Sawyer went to with the tape recorder, and he was the only one to continue trying to find a way off the island for everyone.

Claire Littleton is played by Emilie de Ravin.  She is Jack's little sister, although neither knows that fact, and she went through a rough patch in her teen years.  She caused a car crash that left her mother in a coma, and she refused to take her off of the life support because of the guilt she felt.  A few years later Claire and her boyfriend Thomas conceived a child and decided to keep it and raise it together, but Thomas got scared.  Claire was then going to put the baby up for adoption but a psychic advised against it.  He warned her that if she was not a large part of the child's life, bad things would happen.  Once she finally came to believe him, the psychic told her that there was a family in Los Angeles that could care for the child and gave her a plane ticket for Oceanic Flight 815.  She didn't understand, as he had been telling her for months that she had to raise it herself, but she got on the plane anyway.  Apparently he had foreseen the crash and knew that she would survive to raise her baby.  She had a traumatic few weeks leading up to giving birth on the island which started with her nightmares.  She woke up screaming during the night, believing that someone was trying to hurt her baby, but they weren't just dreams.  An Other named Ethan had assimilated himself into the group of survivors and captured Claire and Charlie once he was found out.  Claire was taken to a medical hatch where the Others were going to take her baby by force and then kill her.  A teenage girl named Alex saved her and Danielle helped her back to the losties.  She had no memory of the two weeks after the crash, but began to remember things with Charlie's help.  After giving birth to her son Aaron, Claire found out that she knew nothing about motherhood and became very frazzled, relying on her friends to help her out, especially Charlie.  She finally began to open up and accept Charlie's love for her and Aaron, so the news of his death is going to hit her hard.

Jack, the self-proclaimed "heroic doctor" and unwilling leader of the group, is played by Matthew Fox.  The character of Jack was originally supposed to die in the first episode, but we ended up getting stuck with him.  He was in Australia to find his father, with whom he never had a real loving relationship with (Jack was actually the cause of his father losing his doctor's license).  His father ended up being dead once he found him and Jack was transporting the coffin back to the states.  Jack's only real personality traits are that he needs to fix things, he's better than everyone else at everything, and that he just cares too darn much.  He wants to do everything and save everyone on the island, but he's only one man.  He is the only doctor on the island and should be taking care of himself for the group instead of going off on suicide missions all the time.  Jack, although he didn't want to be the leader, had a problem with others telling him what to do.  While Locke, Sayid, or even Sawyer would have been much better candidates for leader, Jack never even consults them with his decisions.  He fights with Locke, doesn't listen to Sayid, and belittles Sawyer.  Also, although he seems to feel something for Kate, he can't see her for who she is.  She is a wanted criminal, but he treats her as a helpless girl that needs to be "fixed", and he has brought her to tears with his tirades of disappointment more times than I can count.  Also, what kind of leader bargains for his own passage off the island and is perfectly content leaving his own people handcuffed in the hands of the enemy?  At least a lot of people began to question Jack's authority after he brought Juliet into their camp and proved that he trusted her more than those he had known since the crash.  Speaking of Juliet, she is a strong female that doesn't take Jack's crap and he treats her as his equal, which is really refreshing to see.  Is it wrong that I took pleasure in knowing that he turns into a junkie in the future?  I mean the hero, the leader, the one who acted like he was better than everyone else turned into a psychotic drug addict - what could be more satisfying than that?

Hugo "Hurley" Reyes is played by Jorge Garcia.  A few years before the crash, Hurley was institutionalized in a mental hospital because of an accident he caused.  Apparently an overcrowded deck collapsed when he stepped on it and two people were killed.  He blamed himself and began to eat to punish himself.  He also made up an imaginary friend named Dave at the hospital that was a bad influence on him.  Once he was released, he won the lottery using the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42.  A lot of bad things happened after he won and he realized that it was the numbers that were cursed.  He was in Australia investigating the numbers before the plane crash, and he believed that it was his fault that they were stranded.  Hurley wanted more than anything to make everyone happy on the island and even built a golf course for fun.  He couldn't get away from the numbers though, as they were all over Rousseau's maps, the hatch, the food containers, everything.  He warned Locke not to open the hatch because of the numbers, but he didn't listen.  When the tailies made their way across the island, Hurley wanted to get to know Libby better.  She had actually been a patient at the same mental hospital he was, and although he thought he recognized her he couldn't make the connection.  The two were falling for each other and were going to go on their first date, but he forgot the picnic blanket and she ended up being shot by Michael when she went to get one.  No matter how hard Hurley tries to be happy and have fun, bad things always happen when he is around and there doesn't seem to be any way to stop them.  He was able to save his friends on the beach in the third season finale, but his best friend Charlie died on the same day and he is going to have to deal with that.  Will he think that it happened because of the curse that follows him around?

Married couple Sun and Jin Kwon are played by Yunjin Kim and Daniel Dae Kim respectively.  She was the daughter of a wealthy businessman and he the son of a fisherman and a prostitute, but they fell in love.  To win her hand in marriage, Jin had to take a job from Sun's father, and their relationship went downhill from there.  Sun was blackmailed by Jin's mother and she went to her father for the money to pay the woman off.  Sun's father forced Jin to do bad things to pay off that debt, though Jin did not know about what Sun did.  Sun did not love the new Jin and she began to take English lessons (and have an affair that ended with her lover committing suicide) with the intention of leaving him.  On the same trip that she was planning to leave, Jin had decided to take her and start a new life in America away from her father.  Both of their plans fell through though, as the plane they were on crashed on the island.  Jin only spoke Korean and believed that Sun did as well, so they had no way of communicating with the others.  When Jin was accused of burning the raft, Sun revealed that she spoke English to the entire group and Jin to help him.  He felt humiliated and betrayed and wouldn't speak to her anymore.  He decided to go on the new raft with Michael, Walt, and Sawyer so that he could save Sun from the island, because they still loved each other very much.  The raft didn't work, but Jin made his way back to Sun and the two fell more in love with each other after the time apart.  Sun has begun to assert herself more and go against Jin's orders to gain a more equal relationship.  Jin, in turn, has become less controlling, but he is still as protective because he has to care for both his wife and child to be now.  He even began to understand and try and learn more English (with the help of Sawyer).  When Sun found out about pregnant women dying on the island, she allowed Juliet to find out the date of conception for her child.  She found out that the child was indeed Jin's and that it was conceived on the island, so she only has about two months left to live unless they get off the island.  Of course, she did not tell this information to Jin.

Boone Carlyle was played by Ian Somerhalder in the first season.  Boone had an easy life financially because of his mother's success, but not emotionally.  Even though Shannon was his stepsister, Boone loved her (not in a brotherly way) and would do anything for her.  When the plane crashed, he wanted to do everything he could to help out and put Shannon down for her unwillingness.  When Claire was kidnapped, he went with Locke to try and find her and happened upon the hatch.  The two became buddy-buddy because of their secret and tried their hardest to open it up.  Boone wanted to tell Shannon about their find, but Locke advised against it.  Locke knew that he was too preoccupied with his sister and helped Boone get over her.  His friendship with Locke proved to be fatal though, as he was seriously injured on one of their treks through the jungle.  Locke had a vision of a plane in the jungle, and the two found it perched high up on a cliff.  Boone climbed up to investigate it, but his weight caused the plane to fall.  Locke brought him back to Jack, but nothing could be done.  His leg was crushed, his lung collapsed, and he was bleeding internally.  Jack tried his hardest to fix Boone, but it was futile.

Shannon Rutherford was played by Maggie Grace.  Shannon was a spoiled daddy's girl with an evil stepmother.  When Shannon's father died, Boone's mother wouldn't give her any money because she didn't have to.  Shannon was left to fend for herself and thought to use her brother's feelings against him.  She would become involved with men and pretend that they beat her so that Boone would come to her rescue.  He would always come and pay off whoever it was and Shannon would then split the money with the guy.  In Australia however, her boyfriend took off with all of the money and she ran to Boone.  When the plane crashed, Shannon wouldn't lift a finger for anything.  While everyone else was gathering food and supplies, Shannon was sunbathing and giving herself pedicures.  She was always told how useless she was until Sayid finally gave her some confidence in herself.  She fell in love with Sayid and just as she realized that he wasn't like everyone else and wouldn't leave her, she was shot by Ana Lucia.  Shannon grew a lot throughout the show and became a much more mature and responsible individual. 

Father and son Michael Dawson and Walt Lloyd were played by Harold Perrineau and Malcolm David Kelley.  Michael and his girlfriend Susan had Walt and then drifted apart.  Despite Michael's protests, she took Walt with her and married another man.  Michael was a struggling artist and Susan was a talented lawyer who could give Walt everything he could ever need.  Michael was not a part of Walt's upbringing, but when Susan died he was forced back into his son's life.  Her husband Brian didn't want Walt and asked Michael to take him back to New York with him.  Walt knew nothing about his real father and didn't really want to learn either.  Michael didn't know how to be a father, but was forced to learn quickly after the crash.  The two grew closer and learned to respect the other as family.  Michael devised a plan to get them off the island by building a raft, but Walt didn't want to leave, and he actually burned the first raft to keep from having to leave.  He helped his father build a second raft and they set sail, but that night Walt was kidnapped by the Others and Michael was left drifting in the water.  Michael became totally focused on finding his son and getting him back at all costs.  He ran off from the group more than once and was taken by the Others as well.  They made a deal with him to get Walt back and Michael accepted - anything to get his boy back.  He went back to the losties and made up a story about how he found the others and how they could take them out.  He killed Ana Lucia and Libby in cold blood, released Henry Gale, and led four of his "friends" into a trap, but he got Walt back and was given a boat to leave the island - where's the justice in that?