The mystery surrounding Matthew Fox‘s Hollywood vanishing act has been solved.

The Lost vet — who has not acted in nearly a decade — broke his silence about his decision to leave showbiz. Fox also revealed why he recently decided to hit pause on his retirement to star in Peacock’s upcoming apocalyptic drama series Last Light.

“I kind of had a bucket list in my mind of things that I wanted to accomplish in the business, and after I did [the movie] Bone Tomahawk in 2014 that had kind of completed the bucket list,” he told reporters (per Variety) Saturday at the Monte-Carlo Film Festival, where Last Light had its world premiere. “I wanted to do a Western. It’s a very odd Western, but it’s a Western. And so that sort of completed the bucket list.”

Another factor, Fox said, was family. “At that time in my life, our kids were at an age where I felt like I needed to really reengage,” he explained of his two children with wife Margherita Ronchi. “I had been focused on work for some time, and [my wife] Margherita had been running the family so beautifully, but I felt like it was time to be home, and I really felt like I was retiring from the business, and working on other creative elements that are really personal to me — some music and writing.”

Last Light, which co-stars Downton Abbey‘s Joanne Froggatt, brings Fox — who also serves as an EP on the series — back to TV for the first time since Lost ended in 2010. The thriller imagines a world plunged into crisis when oil suppliers are jeopardized. A Peacock premiere date is TBD.

“I kind of got to a point where I thought that maybe the bucket list included executive producing,” he said of being lured back to acting. “I’d never done that before. The opportunity to be involved in Last Light came along, and so I wanted to give it a shot. And it felt like the right time.”

Fox’s retirement also came amid a turbulent time in his personal life. In 2011, he was accused of assaulting a female bus driver in Cleveland, Ohio. He denied the allegations and prosecutors ultimately opted not to charge him. A subsequent civil suit filed was withdrawn by the bus driver. Fox’s Lost co-star Dominic Monaghan added fuel to the fire, tweeting in May 2012 that Fox “beats women. Not isolated incidents. Often.”

He acknowledged that “it’s been a very tough year for me and my family,” adding, “It’s difficult to be accused of something you did not do.”

Fox has lived a quieter life since that time, and he may have been nervous to return to the fray, but he felt ready to reengage with television. “I’ve just spent seven years living my life with my family and pursuing things that I’m passionate about,” he said, “but storytelling is in my DNA in some way, and I felt like this form of storytelling was something that I wanted to reengage with, and see how it felt. And I’m really happy that I did so – it’s been good.”

Gordon added: “I will just say it was no easy feat to lure Matthew out of retirement, and it took a project of this caliber and this cast and this important story to literally lure him because he has a beautiful life with his wife and children. And it was not easy to lure him. But we felt so privileged that we got him off the sofa.”

Since Fox and Gordon worked together on “Party of Five,” at the start of his career, his approach to acting has evolved. “I think I approached the work in a very different way at that time. So I think it was probably not as collaborative an experience at that time, because I was pretty guarded about it all.”

He added: “But this experience was very collaborative. And it was tremendous. And we had this behemoth of a story to try to stitch together and to try to track this character through this arc over five episodes.”

He credits streaming as having “opened a whole new area of premise that only requires five chapters.” He expanded: “It’s too much story to tell in a film, but it’s not enough story to tell in even one 10 episode series. And I think it’s been really good for television, because one of the things that I’ve been frustrated with in the past is you have these premises that are kind of driven a little bit longer than they should be, right, and the audience senses when something’s being stretched thin.”

He continued: “So streaming is moving us in a direction where stories are being told in just the amount of time that they need to be told in, and that’s always going to be a very beneficial thing for storytelling.”

Gordon added: “I would just add to that by saying we were babies when we did ‘Party of Five,’ absolute babies. And in those days, television shows were shot primarily on sound stages. In this new age of the rise of fantastic streaming material around the globe, the audience’s expectations are extremely high.

“And so, what we are required to deliver is not ordinary television, but extraordinary television. And this is why it was important that we go on location, that we have extraordinary locations, that we give it global scope. We’re telling a global story. And that production value was very important to all of us to deliver our story through feature filmmaking techniques as much as possible.

“I think in the new age of television the bar is very high and we’re seeing it internationally around the globe, things that are being done everywhere – ‘Tehran,’ you know, so many fantastic series that we love in America that have been made on foreign soil. So I think it’s an extraordinary time for all of us to be in this business.”