Before the “Lost” finale’s accidentally-misleading closing credits rolled, the series ended with the characters reunited in a church. The church existed not in the real world or in heaven, but in a sort of purgatory designed for the cast to find closure. The “Lost” showrunners didn’t want any fans finding out about the ending ahead of time, however, so they came up with a plan to throw them off the scent.
“We were really concerned about anybody figuring out what was going to be happening in the big church scene,” co-showrunner, Carlton Cuse, told Vulture in 2021. “So during production we hired two extras that looked like Sun and Jin and we put them in wedding clothes and we put them outside the church. And we were taking them in and out in a way that any paparazzi or people that were trying to figure out what’s going on would think that we were staging Sun and Jin’s wedding.”
Yunjin Kim, who played Sun, had no memory of a lookalike extra on the set, but Jorge Garcia (who played Hugo “Hurley” Reyes) did. He recalled the crew referring to the church scene as “Sun’s wedding, even though we knew that wasn’t anything that was going to go on in it.” When Kim was told about the trick, she remarked, “Wow. I had no idea that was happening. They didn’t tell us anything we didn’t need to know.”
The Lost writers grew very secretive throughout the show’s final seasons
Michael Emerson, who played the always-scheming Benjamin Linus, told Vulture that the script for the finale was “a high-security script.” He explained, “When you got pages, which were usually the day you worked, they were printed on red paper, which is unreproducible.”
Other cast members confirmed that the writers had grown increasingly secretive, to the point where the scripts each cast member received often excluded scenes their character wasn’t part of. Henry Ian Cusick, who played Desmond Hume, recalled having a hard time understanding what his character was even doing throughout the Season 6 flash-sideways storyline. “I just need to do my job,” he recalled telling the showrunners over the phone. “I don’t really know what’s going on.”
The team’s approach to preserving spoilers may come off paranoid, but “Lost” already had the internet spoil its plot before. In 2008, a “Lost”‘ fan site posted leaks that spoiled nearly every major event in Season 4. Throughout Season 6, the same site kept tabs on every leak that came out about upcoming episodes, including the discovery in April of a misplaced call sheet for the finale found in a cafe in Honolulu. “Lost” may have had one of the most controversial TV finales ever, but it also had an unprecedently dedicated online fanbase.
