Press Telegram
by Greg Hernandez
April 27, 2008
Imagine being a young actor just off your first big film and a director meets you with this most unusual job offer: You are to play a paralyzed soldier and not let on to anyone you know - not even your co-stars or the film's crew - that you can walk in real life.
It happened to Lee Pace, now the star of ABC's "Pushing Daisies," who filmed his part in director Tarsem Singh's epic fantasy "The Fall" four years ago when he was not yet famous. He played a bedridden man in a hospital who befriends a young girl with a broken collarbone and starts telling her a vivid, fantastical story of exotic lands.
"I thought, `Great! I'll really be acting now, great method stuff,"' said Lee, who was trained at Juilliard. "I had only done one movie before this. He had seen `Soldier's Girl' and thought I'd be perfect for this one. God knows why."
Lee talked about what a toll the role took on him - far more than playing Ned on "Daisies," a pie maker with the power to bring dead people back to life.
"It was really lonely," he said when we spoke a few days ago. "I could walk around but no one could see me. I couldn't have anyone over. I had to lie to everyone. Everyone thought I was paralyzed. I wasn't the pie maker (on `Daisies') then so I could get away with it."
The other challenge was acting opposite then 6-year-old Catinca Untaru, a Romanian girl who didn't know a word of English.
"She was cautious and as it went on, she got real close to my character. She would take care of me, draw me little pictures. She would play with my nose and talk in a way that was absolutely private. It's like she had no idea she was being filmed. My job was kind of getting her to talk and be un-self-conscious and improvise with her a lot."
"The Fall" goes into limited release on May 9, marking the first time it can be seen in the U.S. outside the film festival circuit.
"When I had my very first meeting with Tarsem, he said, `This is the kind of movie that they will teach about in film school.' I thought, `Yeah, every director says that.' But it really is. He has made a movie that is absolutely incredible and I played a little part in doing that. It's layered and complicated. It's a really, really special movie."
Lee, 29, has managed to land a series of parts in quality films and television shows, including the recent "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day" opposite Amy Adams. In the upcoming "Possession," he gets above-the-title billing for the first time with co-star Sarah Michelle Gellar.
In his 2003 breakthrough film "Soldier's Girl," Lee played Calpernia Addams, a transgender woman dating Army soldier Barry Winchell (Troy Garity), who was murdered because of his sexuality and his relationship with Addams.
After he was cast, he told director Frank Pierson he was having a difficult time finding his way into the drag-queen element of the character.
"Pierson just said, `Play the woman and the story will be clear.'
"All I had to do was play the integrity of it, falling in love with someone else, getting away from her past. After that, the makeup people will do their job."
"I'm really proud of that film. When I broke it to my parents that I was playing Calpernia, my mom was like, `Oh, well, at least you're not playing a killer.' When I got cast in `Infamous,' I was like, `Guess what, Mom?"'
In "Infamous," Lee and Daniel Craig portrayed the two killers Truman Capote wrote about in his book "In Cold Blood." The film was shot before Craig was cast as the new James Bond but things were already in the works for him to become the next 007.
With a string of good movie parts behind him, Lee was not even thinking of doing any television when "Pushing Daisies" creator Bryan Fuller approached him. The two men had worked together in Fuller's previous series, the short-lived "Wonderfalls."
"`Wonderfalls' burned me on the whole TV thing. The network did not support us ... and I was hesitant to get back into it. But too many things were right about this. The material and the script was good, and knowing Bryan Fuller I had real faith in how he would develop it. It's scary signing that kind of contract but I'm really glad I did it. It's been a strong experience all the way around."
"When I first read the script, I was like, `This is gonna be a hit.'
"So, the real debate was, `Am I comfortable being the lead of a popular TV show?' You have a very different life. People get you on TV for free in their homes, you are more approachable when you are in airplanes, people watch me in restaurants. I'm really tall and people think, `That tall guy looks like the pie maker."'
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