Dominic Monaghan, the British actor from “Lost” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, finds a new vocation tonight in hosting his own extreme animals series.
“Wild Things with Dominic Monaghan” (BBC America, 10:15 p.m.) had its direct inspiration of the work of Steve Irwin, the host said recently at the TV Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena.
“I was in Hawaii shooting ‘Lost’ and was pretty devastated by his death,” Monaghan said. “And I had said for a long time to a lot of people that I was going to make a nature
show. And after I got over the initial shock of him dying, I just thought, if this is not a reason for me to really pick up the pieces now and make the show, I don’t know what is, because he meant a lot to me.”
In the new series, he travels to exotic locales to commune with the kind of creatures many people wouldn’t — from spiders to snakes.
“I never got a chance to meet him or tell him that, but he meant a lot to me, and I think he was a superb human being across the board. So there are elements of the show that,
in my way, is a love letter to Steve Irwin, to what he achieved as a person and to the television shows that he left behind.”
And by enduring Monaghan’s commune with snakes, bees and spiders, maybe, he said, ” maybe you’ll expose yourself slightly to some degree to those animals, when you see a little innocuous spider on your ceiling of your bathroom, instead of freaking out and losing your mind, you might think, I’ll let him live out his days there and catch mosquitoes for me, catch flies for me, and maybe feel a little bit better about life.”
“Wild Things with Dominic Monaghan” runs its eight episodes on BBC America, starting tonight at 10:15 p.m.