Wayward Pines (Fox, 9pm)

I COULDN'T help it. As soon as I heard the first announcement on air of this series my mind snapped automatically to that Laurel and Hardy hit song moment and filled my head with The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.

To be honest, I was never going to take it too seriously having lived through the heigh-day of Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner, on which the plot is so heavily based. Not to mention the whiff of gunsmoke about the show's star Matt Dillon, who has to put all his acting talent into making us believe that US Secret Service agent Ethan Burke can end up in a strange little town after a car accident, only to find the friendliness vanishes when he tries to leave.

Wisely the actor has only committed himself to one run of Wayward Pines, a ten-part series adapted from Blake Crouch's novel Pines and developed by The Sixth Sense's M Night Shyamalan.

The series has also been likened to David Lynch's surreal TV series Twin Peaks, and Dillon says: "I think Wayward Pines is in its own crazy world. There are no new ideas, it's how you interpret them that makes them fresh. We've seen it before, the fish out of water, trying to cope with the challenges that come in a dark way. The tricky part is that he doesn't become a spectator to the events happening, and that he's proactive.

"I think the key thing for me is that this character is someone who has to have command and lead well, and I like playing characters like that, and feel that is who I am. Not always, but when the chips are down, I like to think I'm the type of person that can say, 'Hey, let's come up with a plan', and I think it's a strength I can do that in a character."

The New Yorker is the second of six children – his brother Kevin is in Entourage – was reportedly playing truant from school when he was spotted and cast in Over The Edge in 1979.

The film was poorly received, but Dillon went on to make Little Darlings and My Bodyguard, both box office successes, before adding Tex, Rumble Fish and The Outsiders, which also starred Diane Lane, Tom Cruise and Patrick Swayze.

"I was the second youngest in the cast but I was a veteran. Fame is a weird thing, because I don't think anyone's prepared to deal with it, and everyone deals with it in a different way. I often feel like anonymity is a luxury often taken for granted. Yeah, there are some benefits, you can get tables at restaurants and people admire you or whatever, but there's something to be said for not getting recognised," Dillon says.

In the 1990ss, the actor appeared in Cameron Crowe's Singles, To Die For with Nicole Kidman, the comedy There's Something About Mary (he dated co-star Cameron Diaz for three years) and Wild Things. In 2006, he earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance in Crash.

The 51-year-old says he feels a certain amount of frustration with how his career has panned out.

"I always feel like I'm being typecast, because I feel like I can do a lot more than I've been given the opportunity to do. I do feel, if I've had to look at some of my earlier movies, I go, 'Ooh, damn', because I was a kid – but then I have to remind myself that I was learning on the job," he says.

Dillon admits he can be very tough on material, and despite writing City Of Ghosts in 2002, which he also directed, he's currently struggling with a script. "I've got a project that I've been trying to do for a long time as a film, and at every attempt, the story gets compromised, because I can't find a way of compressing it to a 90-minute or two-hour format. I'm not smart enough to do that," he says.

Viv Hardwick