Josh Lucas describes his career as a tide—fitting, given the fifty-one-year-old spent his childhood on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, just outside Charleston. At age nine, he got bitten by the acting bug there, after hiding in the dunes to watch a small production company film a climactic scene between two teenage lovers. Since then, he’s stepped in front of the camera in such movies as, , , and. He’s acted onstage, too, and his extensive voice-over work means you might also recognize his smooth intonations from Home Depot commercials and Ken Burns documentary narrations. ¶ In the first two seasons of the über-popular TV show, he appeared as a young John Dutton, the rancher-patriarch played in the present day by Kevin Costner. “We had no ideawould catch fire the way it has,” Lucas recalls. Now his young Dutton will feature prominently in the show’s fifth season, which debuted in mid-November. He credits his roots with carrying him this far: “The tide,” he says, “is always stronger in the South.”
