'It's definitely been interesting and eventful, it's never been boring," says Naveen Andrews, leaning back on a plump sofa in an oppressively overdone London hotel room, his black curls spreading out behind his head like a halo. "Incredibly stressful at times, but it's been a ride. But I don't think I would have had it any other way." From there - teenage dropout, alcoholic, drug addict who fathered a child with his maths teacher - to here, a 39-year-old global TV star, seems like a big leap. It's hard to know where to start.
Perhaps we should begin on more solid ground, if the ridiculously confusing TV show Lost could ever be described as that. Now in its fourth season, the end is finally in sight. The hugely expensive TV drama, in which a group of aesthetically pleasing survivors of a plane crash find themselves on an island they have to share with, among other things, rogue polar bears, underwater bunkers, and a group of sinister inhabitants called the Others, will come to an end after the sixth season. All the bizarre, disparate storylines and questions will be tied up, but that isn't to say that Andrews has any intention of revealing what happens in the fourth series (the writers' strike in America has meant they haven't even finished shooting it, even though they have just started to screen it).
Andrews plays Sayid, an Iraqi and former Republican Guard soldier. Today, he seems to have raided Sayid's wardrobe, wearing a tight white vest that shows off his arms - hard and brown and shiny as conkers - but his accent is pure south London. He talks measuredly, as if feeling his way through. All he will say about what happens in the new series is "You'll see him in a new light and it's genuinely surprising. It took me by surprise. There is romance, but I can't say where it is or how it is. It's a bit raunchy."
Even he doesn't know if Sayid will make it to the end (from flash-forwards at the end of the last season, we know that some of the survivors do get off the island). I hope he does - he is by far the best character and didn't have nearly enough to do in the last series. The reaction to the character in America, Andrews says, has only been good. "I'm just going from walking down the street and meeting people," he says. "That's also a way in which you can, in some small way, change things. I guess people would be assailed by propaganda into seeing the so-called enemy, and we were offering something different. It was unusual at the time. After we shot the pilot, I was very pleased with what he developed into - the leap of faith that the writers took and the courage they had to show an Arab, at that time with the war, in a particular light that you don't really see in Hollywood or anywhere else for that matter. Somebody who was capable of extreme violence and yet was maybe romantic, capable of heroism." What I like about him (putting aside his penchant for torture for a moment) is that he's so practical - he's the man they all go to when they need to fix stuff. He's sensible. "Not like me at all," says Andrews.
I can't decide if Andrews actively seeks out a chaotic life, or it just happens to him. Whatever, it never seems to defeat him, either by luck or the sheer force of his charm. He grew up in Wandsworth in the 70s and 80s when it can't have been much fun for a British Asian boy. "It wasn't," he says. "I don't want to make it into a sob story. I'm sure plenty of people my age from similar backgrounds had to go through the same thing. Wandsworth at that time was quite working class and there was one other Indian family in the street; everyone else was white. It was hard, but at the same time I kind of preferred the racism from the working-class people - they let you know where it's at straight away - than from the middle classes that came later on." When he became an actor? "Yes. People who would blanch at the idea of being thought of as being racist when they know that it fucking well is obvious." He thinks for a minute. "But I don't know; I was so completely out of it by that point so I'm sure [directors] thought about that rather than my race. I'm sure I must have made it very difficult to be considered anything other than a junkie or a drunk. So I've got to be fair."
It's too simplistic to say that Andrews's drink and drug problems - he was addicted to heroin and alcohol throughout his 20s - were rooted in a hellish childhood, but it contributed. His parents had moved to England from Kerala in southern India in the middle of the 1960s. Looking back, Andrews can see how hard it must have been for them. "They were both academics but my dad had to get a job on the railway and my mum had to get a job in the Post Office. It was pretty hard in terms of the racism they had to endure. Now, I guess I have a lot of sympathy for the fact that they were trying to bring up a child in an alien environment. My mum made a conscious decision not to teach me any Indian languages so I wouldn't talk with an accent. Obviously your children absorb different values and it must have been hard for them to reconcile that with what they were trying to do in terms of bringing me up."
They were strict and conservative, but also violent. "I think they both had a problem, looking back." He gives a small laugh with a briefest hint of bitterness. "I think they did the best they could. They would say, 'The reason why we do it is because we love you'. They didn't know any other way." Was there any kind of love at home? "Mmm, but it was a very twisted sort of tenderness. When my partner Barbara [Hershey, the actor] was a child, in her house there was a lot of silence, people having all this vicious anger and tension underneath the skin and it never quite exploding. Whereas I had all the explosions. I don't know which is better, I think they're both equally damaging."
His interest in acting had been sparked in primary school. He remembers his parents being told by his teacher that he had talent. "This was in 1976 and they were like, 'What, so he can be in It Ain't Half Hot Mum'. To them it was anathema - how's he going to live? I guess they were right at that time." They weren't happy about him becoming an actor, but by the time he went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama - he had gone, he says, because he had no other qualifications, had heard that the education authority would pay for him and there would be girls there - his mum was pleased that he was in any kind of educational establishment. They didn't live long enough to see their son straightened out and win a Golden Globe nomination for his role in Lost.
The repercussions of their family life are still with him - Andrews has a younger brother but they don't speak. "When I was growing up, my parents played divide and rule," he says. "I was errant and he wasn't. It's quite sad really. They destroyed our relationship and it made it really difficult for both of us later on to be close."
When he was 15, he was thrown out of home - "a natural consequence of it getting so violent." He went to live with his maths teacher and they later embarked on an affair - his son, Jaisal, was born when he was in his early 20s. By the time he had split up with his son's mother, a couple of years later, Andrews had developed heroin and alcohol addictions. "I just loved alcohol and drugs," he says, by way of explanation. "Things that happen to you in your childhood, bad experiences, can inform you but don't necessarily make you an alcoholic or a drug addict. You have to put the hours in and really work quite hard at abusing yourself." He laughs and I wonder how well his dark sense of humour goes down in Los Angeles.
It's astounding that not only was he able to work, but put in some of the best performances of his career, in the TV adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's novel The Buddha of Suburbia and as Kip, the bomb disposal expert in the English Patient. Andrews was always able to come off heroin for a job, he says, but alcohol took its place. "I was warned before every job. [The directors] Roger Michell and Anthony Minghella both said 'We know what you do and I want to make it clear there will be no drinking on set.' I'm sure there were lapses, but the point is I was able to still do my job."
He wasn't always. To give me an idea of the insanity of it he says, "I was doing a job for [the director] Mira Nair when I was about 27 and I collapsed and they had to bring a doctor in. I thought, 'Well my body's not absorbing it in the same way,' but I didn't think I had a problem. I didn't stop." How does he feel about that period in his life? "I don't think there was any alternative. It allowed me to explode. I was in need of a drink, put it that way. If I hadn't, I either would have killed myself or someone else. So I'm glad it was there. The thing is they stop working. It's not from any virtue that I'm sober now, it's that I can't do it. It wouldn't work in the same way as it did when I was 20."
Andrews has been clean for five years. When he was 29, he went to a dinner party in LA hosted by a friend, and the former Sex Pistol Steve Jones was also there. A childhood hero of Andrews, he noticed that the guitarist didn't drink or smoke. "I couldn't really understand it and I asked him about it. I think that's when the light bulb went on. I thought, 'He's sober. If he can do it then maybe I have a chance.' His example was important because when people told me they were sober, I didn't think it was possible. I thought they were lying." Jones took Andrews to his first AA meeting. "I don't obsess about drink or drugs any more. It's not an option, it's not an issue even."
He lists the benefits of sobriety. He has a good relationship with his son, who lives in London but comes to stay with him in LA every school holiday. "I put a lot of that down to being sober. If he had to grow up in these crucial teenage years with me being out of it, I don't know if we'd have a relationship to be honest. As a parent, I'm present, which I wasn't when he was younger." And then there's the work. Andrews will hopefully make it to the end of Lost, as long as the Others don't get him. In the short breaks between filming, he made Planet Terror, and The Brave One, with Jodie Foster, and he hopes to be in Shantaram, another Mira Nair film, on hold at the moment because of the writers' strike. One day, he says, he will do music (he has been playing the guitar since he was a child).
Andrews hasn't been back to London for two years, which seems to have just as much to do with the bad memories here as it does his heavy workload. "Los Angeles is the only place that I can honestly say I have ever called home. I never felt at home in London, because people were constantly telling me I didn't belong here, so after a while, you tend to believe that." It's hard to tell if Andrews feels sad or angry or both or neither. In India, he felt like a foreigner too, he says, because he couldn't speak the language and felt that even the way he moved marked him out.
If Los Angeles feels like home, it probably has a lot to do with his relationship with Hershey - he moved there to be with her nearly 10 years ago (they separated for a while in 2005 and Andrews fathered a child with another woman). There is a fascination with their age difference - she is 21 years his senior - which wouldn't happen if he was the older man, and must annoy them both. "I've become inured to it over the last few years," he says. "It's never been an issue for me. I never think about it. If anything, it was the other way around, a point of attraction for me." Why? "Probably because I had such a terrible relationship with my mother. So you're basically, like, looking for a nice mum that you can also shag." There is a slight stunned silence, then we both burst out laughing. That is wrong on so many levels, I say. "No, you're right, that sounds terrible," he says, laughing. "I don't think she thinks about [the age difference] either. The point is we love each other."
His younger son has just turned two and he sees him regularly. I wonder how he finds fatherhood, given his own childhood. "I think I may have failed at a lot of things, but the one thing I can say, and that I'm proud of, is that I am a good parent," he says. "The great lesson I got from my parents is how not to treat your children. To break that chain, even if I don't do anything else, at least I've done that."
· Lost is on Sky One on Sundays at 9pm.