Josh Holloway and Rachel Hilson Take Us Behind the Scenes of JJ Abrams’s Duster

Over a decade after turning Lost into a cult favorite, Josh Holloway and J.J. Abrams are back together. In Duster, Abrams’s new ‘70s-set crime series in collaboration with LaToya Morgan, Holloway is a brooding mafia getaway driver whizzing Rachel Hilson, who plays the FBI’s first Black female rookie, through the Arizona desert in his eponymous red muscle car. The show is a headless adrenaline rush—stunts, shootouts, car chases, and a few scenes almost too racy for the kids, Holloway laughs. But the duo’s camaraderie, despite their differences, is the takeaway, something they’ve found equally rewarding in real life. “I like our contrast,” Holloway tells Hilson when they stepped away from a long day at work to talk about the little miracles that brought them together.

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RACHEL HILSON: So, Josh.

JOSH HOLLOWAY: Talk to me, girl. Where are your shoes? Let’s start there.

HILSON: Don’t worry about it. I don’t know, is the answer. How are you? I know it’s been a long day.

HOLLOWAY: I’ve been talking about the show and finally figuring out how to talk about it.

HILSON: Tell me about shooting in Albuquerque.

HOLLOWAY: I call it Albuquirky because it is very interesting. There are a lot of interesting folks in Albuquerque. The desert is a character in itself. I’m a mountain person. I grew up in the North Georgia mountains, so—

HILSON: Wrong place for you.

HOLLOWAY: To live, but I love the elements of the desert. I’ve been enjoying that exploration, but I realize I need trees.

HILSON: Good for Jim, bad for Josh.

HOLLOWAY: Right. What about you? What’s it like compared to Baltimore?

HILSON: Very different. I haven’t lived in Baltimore in a long time. Albuquerque’s very beige. Baltimore is a little bit more colorful, I’d say. So is New York. But I think it made it easier to sort of drop into this world because it is so vastly different from what we’re used to.

HOLLOWAY: Exactly. Are you a city girl or a suburban or country girl in Baltimore? 

HILSON: Well, I live in New York City now, and I’ve always been attracted to urban life. But being in L.A. is also so nice because you’re around trees and plants and stuff. 

HOLLOWAY: Are you ever going to sing on the show? You have a beautiful voice.

HILSON: Am I ever going to sing on the show?

HOLLOWAY: I think we should suggest that to LaToya [Morgan].

HILSON: Well, I feel like if Nina goes undercover again, maybe she can go undercover as a night lounge singer. 

HOLLOWAY: I like it.

HILSON: I wonder, if there’s a next season, if Nina would make Jim go undercover or something.

HOLLOWAY: What could Jim do?

HILSON: I think it would be funny if he had to do some sort of office job and wear a suit.

HOLLOWAY: Oh god, yes. I would be awful in an office job, by the way. I gave my son my computer for school recently and I’ve had it for three years and it had no files on it. [Laughs] It was clean.

HILSON: No files whatsoever? You also just don’t use technology, so it’s easy to be Jim.

HOLLOWAY: I don’t. But different for you to be Nina. You’re a very sophisticated, educated woman and I grew up on a dirt road and I had no college education. So I like your refinement. I like our contrast.

HILSON: I think our contrast works. I think you’re also sophisticated in your own right.

HOLLOWAY: Did you see me fishing for that? 

HILSON: I did, but I also wanted to offer it up because I believe it to be true. Look at you. You’re dressed in a very sophisticated outfit right now. Anyway, this is really—

HOLLOWAY: Funny and awkward. [Laughs]

HILSON: This is what happens when you don’t give actors lines or prompts.

HOLLOWAY: What is that tattoo on your finger? 

HILSON: It’s a sun that I got on a day when I was feeling a little down. I was like, “I’m going to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and get a tattoo on the other side.”

HOLLOWAY: Fantastic. A little bit of light.

HILSON: Yeah. Do you, or does Jim have any? You didn’t get any tattoos for Jim?

HOLLOWAY: I did not. I have some, but tattoos back in the ’70s were normally for people who were either in motorcycle gangs or it had a different connotation. Now it’s fluid and everyone can have a tattoo. Back then it felt like it was only people who were either in the criminal world or not in the mainstream.

HILSON: Yeah, I think it’s changed completely. And so many actors now have tattoos. I have one friend who is covered in them and he’ll just get them covered up. Speaking of acting… [Laughs] What was your journey like in this industry from the start?

HOLLOWAY: Oh my god. I kind of fell through the cracks, actually. My first acting class was with Corey Allen who played Buzz in Rebel Without a Cause opposite of James Dean. He’s the guy that went off the mountain, couldn’t get out of the car. He looked like Obi-Wan Kenobi. He had a long beard and he was old and he hooked me right away into acting.

HILSON: When was that? 

HOLLOWAY: I don’t even know. It’s so far back. I was 26 or 28. I had opened a restaurant in L.A. and it wasn’t doing well. And I just was like, what else am I going to do? I’ll try acting. I did that and then nine years later I finally booked a job. It was a very difficult journey. I quit three times and then got my real estate license and booked Lost three days later. And you? How was your journey?

HILSON: I wanted to be a dancer for most of my life. I am a trained dancer, whatever that means. I feel like a lot of people dance when they’re young. And then, it was a very long story that you don’t want to hear, but I just stumbled into acting and decided that I would try to like it for a little bit. I don’t think I embraced it fully until college. And then I was like, “Wait, this is actually really fun.” I was in New York at that point and able to audition and just kept doing guest roles. And then I moved to L.A. and the ball got rolling, the cliche was true.

HOLLOWAY: And it worked.

HILSON: By some miracle.

HOLLOWAY: And here we are. [Laughs]

HILSON: What was your favorite scene to shoot?

HOLLOWAY: Well, I liked our scenes in the garage.

HILSON: Yeah, those were fun.

HOLLOWAY: I like the little subtle things, because our relationship is tricky. We slowly come together. So even in body language, we are across from each other in one and then we sit down in another one together and then the next one we’re on the same side, leaning against the car. There was an evolution there, I liked seeing that.

HILSON: I know you enjoy driving the cars.

HOLLOWAY: Well, that too. It’s all stunt stuff, fun as hell. Adrenaline shot, and also some fear because it is dangerous and these cars are vintage. And the master cylinders, which control the whole brake system, can go out.

HILSON: Yeah. 

HOLLOWAY: And there are people there. So I was very conscious of that, and also had an exit plan if things went wrong. That’s a lot of fun. And the shootouts are so fun. I always love a shootout.

HILSON: I might agree with that, which is surprising for me because this was my first time handling a gun ever. I practiced with a real gun at a range with an agent and someone who’s trained. And then obviously we used fake ones, but that was more fun than I thought it would be.

HOLLOWAY: And you’re quite athletic. That was a nice shoulder roll, I must say.

HILSON: I do quite the gorgeous shoulder roll.

HOLLOWAY: Elegant, even.

HILSON: Is it my stunt double or is it me? I don’t know. My dance background came in handy there. And then it’s amazing what they can do in post, because we were firing nothing.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah.

HILSON: I don’t know how they do it. 

HOLLOWAY: I’m glad they do it now because I’ve been on shows for many years using real guns and blanks, and though there is a real adrenaline rush when a real gun goes off loud, I am thankful that they’ve removed a large number of them. Sometimes we use a real one with blanks, but normally not anymore. And once you get used to not having that powerful recoil, then you can act.

HILSON: You’ve been with this project since 2020.

HOLLOWAY: Yes. It’s been five years, pretty much. Right after they called me, the pandemic happened. They pitched me the idea, then the pandemic happened, and then the strikes, and then HBO sold a couple of times. A lot went down.

HILSON: The fact that we’re here is truly a miracle.

HOLLOWAY: And I’m so proud of that. We made it through a lot, and I’m loving people’s response.

HILSON: I know. I am too.