Party of Five alum Matthew Fox was a pure match to play Dr. Jack Shepard, the head of a proverbial family of airplane crash survivors.

But whereas his leading-man presence led to big-screen alternatives in the likes of We Are Marshall, Speed Racer, Alex Cross and World War Z, Fox did not really feel the want to return after making Bone Tomahawk in 2014.

“I wanted to do a Western,” he instructed TV Line in 2022, explaining his lengthy hiatus from appearing. “It’s a very odd Western, but it’s a Western. And so that sort of completed the bucket list.”

More importantly, he added, round that point his daughter Kyle and son Byron with spouse Margherita Ronchi “were at an age where I felt like I needed to really reengage. I had been focused on work for some time, and Margherita had been running the family so beautifully, but I felt like it was time to be home, and I really felt like I was retiring from the business, and working on other creative elements that are really personal to me—some music and writing.”

Fox returned to motion as a star and producer of the Peacock sequence Last Light in 2022, and he has booked roles in the upcoming Yellowstone spin-off The Madison and the Max sequence The Assassin.