Fantasy role for a “poor boy”: fast car, furious life

“Luckily,” Josh Holloway said, “I grew up poor.”
Well … maybe that’s just semi-lucky. And maybe he was just semi-poor. But it did help prepare him for “Duster” (shown here), the show — from “Lost” producer J.J. Abrams — that starts Thursday (May 15) on Max.
Hollywood has plenty of actors who can sort of fake being small-town, Southern and blue-collar. For Holloway, it should come naturally.
He grew up in an unincorporated part of Cherokee County, Georgia, at a time (before a population boom) when the whole county only had 35,000 people. His dad was a surveyor, his mom was a nurse and his life included guy things. “I have three brothers and we grew up loving cars,” he said.
That sets him up for “Duster,” in which he plays a driver for the Mob, zooming around 1972 Arizona in a Plymouth Duster.
“A lot of bad (bleep) happens,” Holloway said, adding: “But he works for the Mafia, so it’s a Monday.”
And no, that doesn’t mean this is a giddy “Dukes of Hazzard” retread. “There’s a (Quentin) Tarantino vibe, a (Martin) Scorsese vibe,” said producer LaToya Morgan, citing two stylish filmmakers.
Abrams is a distinctive director himself. He won an Emmy for directing a “Lost” episode and has made two “Star Trek” films, two “Star Wars” films and a “Mission Impossible.”
In this case, Morgan said, the whole thing started because he imagined a phone booth in the desert, wtih a muscle car pulling up to it. And stepping out of the car, he said, was probably Holloway, one of his “Lost” stars.
From there, the story evolved. The year is 1972 and Nina is the first Black female FBI agent. Gradually, she convinces Jim to work with her. “They are opposites, J.J. would say,” Morgan said, “kind of like we were from opposite worlds.”
For the producers, the differences are mostly on the surface — a white male and Black female. For the characters, there’s that and more. Jim is played by Holloway, 6-foot-1 and muscular; Nina is played by Rachel Hilson, 5-3 and slender.
Jim seems casual; “his breeziness is disarming sometimes,” Holloway said.
Nina is never breezy. Breaking barriers, she’s persistently intense. “She has to make other people believe she can do it,” Hilson said.
In real life, the first one came in 1976. “Duster” fudges that slightly, set in ’72, the first year of the Plymouth Duster.
Holloway approves of the ’70s (he was five months old when they began), the Duster (“it’s an obscure muscle car”) and the notion of wild car chases.
As soon as he got the role, he signed up for a professional stunt-driver school. “It’s like Disneyland for people who are into that kind of thing.”
Now he has the skills … even if producers insist that a professional stunt driver do the hard parts. “They don’t let me hit other cars or jump ….I can parallel park.”
He can also drive fast and pretend he’s being chased. It’s what someone might dream of while growing up sorta-poor in small-town Georgia.