Lost star Dominic Monaghan plays a rocker on his hit show, but in real life you’re more likely to find him behind the turntables. The actor recently put his deejaying skills to good use at Helping Hands, an event organized by actor Greg Grunberg to raise funds to fight epilepsy (the Alias star’s 8-year-old son, Jake, has the disease).

Monaghan ? who along with other Lost and Alias cast members helped bring in $300,000 ? is an old pro. “I’ve been deejaying for my friends since I was about 15,” he told us. “We’d get so tired of being in a club and the music getting me down. So I started my own music, which is a lot more fun.”

So, what kind of mixmaster is he? “The style tends to be kind of old-school rap with a lot of party pleasers. Like ‘ABC’ by The Jackson 5, ‘O.P.P.’ by Naughty by Nature, some Justin Timberlake. I got it all,” he says. “You don’t have to twist my arm too much. I love playing music.”

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THE LORD OF THE RINGS star DOMINIC MONAGHAN has developed a new habit since moving to Los Angeles – walking around naked.

The German actor, who spent a large portion of his life in Britain, admits that the Californian heat he now experiences leaves him with no other option than to shed his clothing.

He says, “I enjoy a little naked time in my house. It’s so hot in LA that I sleep with no clothes on and then I go and have my breakfast – if it’s not cooked – naked. If you have cooked breakfast you can’t be naked.

“I enjoy my nakedness.”

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LORD OF THE RINGS star DOMINIC MONAGHAN’s burgeoning romance with his LOST co-star EVANGELINE LILLY appears to be getting serious.

The British actor and Canadian beauty were romantically linked back in January (05) when they attended the GOLDEN GLOBES together and were “inseparable” all night.

Friends claim Monaghan is so loved up he’s actually thinking about marrying the former missionary and model.

A source says the star recently told him, “I can’t believe how lucky I am – here I am on this fantastic television show, filming in Hawaii and going out with the most beautiful girl in the world.”

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Take 48 plane crash survivors stranded on a very unusual island, add an angry polar bear, a seething love triangle or two, and an invisible monster and you’ve got a surprisingly effective recipe for a television drama that critics call “the next great cult-pop sensation” ? ABC’s new hit series, “Lost.”

“Lost” averages more than 15.5 million weekly viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. The show has spawned countless Web pages where millions of avid fans log on and obsess about the show’s secrets. Like: Where is this mysterious island? Some guess they’re trapped in the Bermuda Triangle. Another theory says they’re all dead and in purgatory.
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THE LORD OF THE RINGS star DOMINIC MONAGHAN has set his two chameleons, KARMA and GELB, free as part of a fond farewell to them in Hawaii.

The lizard-loving actor, who has also had black widow spiders and Madagascan hissing cockroaches as pets, picked up the chameleons when he first arrived on Hawaii to shoot hit US drama LOST.

And, after filming the last episode recently, he decided it was time to let his reptiles go.

He says, “They live in Hawaii, they were introduced about 20 years ago and they flourished there, so I let those guys go the last day that I was working, which was kinda sad but nice.

“I kinda felt like my kind of story in their life was done and they went to do their own thing now – so that was nice.”

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Spending the night with the Lost cast. Watching the Felicity finale. Giving birth to my firstborn child.

Later on, I expect to look back on these three events as my most defining life experiences–in descending order, naturally.

Yes, the Lost panel at the Museum of Television and Radio’s Paley Festival was that good. And lest you think I was the only one who went ape-dung over it, you should know that hundreds of fans lined up at 6 a.m. to get good seats, bought costly tickets on eBay and flew in from mysterious, faraway places like New Jersey.
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THE LORD OF THE RINGS star DOMINIC MONAGHAN was initially embarrassed about his ambitions to become an actor – because he was scared his pals would brand him a homosexual.

The British actor admits he wanted to perform on the screen for a long time before he actually revealed his ambitions.

He says, “I always wanted to be an actor, but there was an embarrassing element to it. Maybe it was from this English stereotype of, ‘If you’re an actor, you’re a homosexual,’ which is a strange thing.”

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Surfing helped DOMINIC MONAGHAN overcome his post-LORD OF THE RINGS depression as he struggled to cope with life after filming on the epic trilogy stopped.

The German-born actor moved to Hollywood from Manchester, England, after finding he had little in common with his friends following his two-year experience filming the Rings movies in New Zealand.

But, Monaghan tells ROLLING STONE magazine he then spent the best part of a year spiralling into depression and loneliness.

He recalls, “I didn’t have a car, I didn’t have a phone… I wasn’t going out, I wasn’t trying to get back on track. I was just spending a year doing nothing.

“It was unhealthy and melancholy for no real reason – and it was cumulative because I got p**sed off that I was depressed.”

It took a surfing holiday, while he visited Rings castmate BILLY BOYD on the set of MASTER + COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD in Mexico, to help him shake his depression.

Boyd recalls, “Being able to get in the water really helped him.”

Monaghan adds, “I just snapped out of it.”

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How Dominic Monaghan snapped out of his hobbit depression and found himself with Lost…

On a hilly Hawaiian road, the centuries-old trees tower over the tarmac, forming a green pavilion that dwarfs the Toyota Prius driven by twenty-eight-year-old Dominic Monaghan. He interrupts his anecdote about fleeing from Paul McCartney at an Oscar party and marvels at the verdant world around us. “Isn’t that great?” Monaghan says with a grin. “It’s like the Shire.”

Identifying an island in the Pacific Ocean as Middle-Earth is an easy mistake for Monaghan. He spent almost two years in New Zealand filming the Lord of the Rings trilogy, playing the hobbit Merry Brandybuck. Now he’s part of the ensemble on Lost , the hit ABC drama about the survivors of a plane crash on an uncharted desert isle. Monaghan plays Charlie, formerly the bassist for the band Drive Shaft, who has gone through heroin withdrawal with only a few aspirin to ease the pain. Charlie is a pleasant bloke trying to shake off some of the darkness of his past. That description fits Monaghan as well. While we drive around Oahu, he flips through the discs in his CD changer: Interpol, the Beatles, Jay-Z. Monaghan likes Interpol, although he disapproves of lead singer Paul Banks, whom he once spotted wearing an Interpol T-shirt at another band’s gig. Shaking his head, he says, “I’d never wear an I AM MERRY T-shirt to get laid.”
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When Dominic Monaghan was a kid, he lived and breathed Star Wars. “I would watch Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back over and over again,” says the actor who’s most widely known as Merry, one of the heroic Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. “I knew the first 45 minutes to an hour of Star Wars word for word. I just obsessed over the film.”

This childhood obsession, in fact, is what sparked Monaghan’s desire to become an actor. “I realized it was what I wanted to do, to have that fantastic gift of being able to take normal people away from the world we all live in and transport them somewhere else. Whether it’s space (as in Star Wars) or Middle Earth (the setting of Lord of the Rings) or an island in the middle of nowhere (the setting of his current hit TV series, Lost), that’s the thing that turns me on about my job.”
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