Men's Vogue
by Michael Walker
May 2008
   
While an off-Broadway hit leads to TV ubiquity and a reinvention of the Hollywood character actor, Lee Pace keeps puttin one foot in front of the other.
Coffee joints in L.A. are famously overrun with idling "thesps," as Variety calls them, waiting for their Treos to warble while another perfect day evaporates.
Lee Pace has seen their faces. "That Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Sunset," the 28-year-old actor acknowledges, conjuring a particularly obnoxious franchise, "that's ground zero for Hollywood drama and desperation."
Pace has just slipped off his tortoiseshell Wayfarers and tabled his iPhone at a Hollywood Starbucks, but he's not exactly waiting for his agent to call. The son of a globe-trotting Texas oilman, he stumbled into acting in high school in order to earn a few elective credits and has since put together a resume that would cause the typical coffeehouse actor-aspirant to choke on his grande macchiato.
While still studying at New York's Julliard School, Pace was cast in his first off-Broadway play, and he's been working steadily in theater, movies, and television ever since: in playwright Craig Lucas's Obie-winning Small Tragedy; alongside Matt Damon in Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd; costarring with Sarah Michelle Gellar in Possession. Meanwhile, his starring role as the amiable piemaker Ned on the sweetly subversive ABC comedy Pushing Dasies - a suprise hit from last season's prime-time schedule - has given Pace his first brush with airport-rubbernecking celebrity.
"I'm not totally comfortable with it," he admits.
Perhaps that's becausehe has spent much of his career disappearing into brutally challenging roles. He snagged a Golden Globe nomination (and lost 25 pounds) for his portrayl of a transsexual stripper in the Showtime movie Soldier's Girl; played Dick Hickock, one of the killers depicted in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (Douglas McGrath's Infamous); and spent three weeks in a wheelchair as a paralyzed Hollywood stuntman in this month's The Fall.
Hang-dog handsome, Pace is a throwback to the classic New York theater-trained actors of the seventies - the Pacinos, De Niros, Hackmans, Hoffmans, and the rest - who defied conventional wisdon to become Hollywood leading men. "That was a time when movie stars were character actors," Pace says. Perhaps their moment has come again. It's not lost on him that this year's Academy Award for best actor went not to George Clooney but to Daniel Day-Lewis, who has made a career inhabiting challenging (and not always likable) personas.
"Lee always struck me as having this Cary Grant quality, where he's very leading man on one level," says Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller, who wrote the part of Ned with Pace in mind. (The actor also appeared in Fuller's blink-and-you-missed-it series on Fox, Wonderfalls) "But he has a very strange and wide range."
The show's premise seems at first blush unbearably contrived: Ned can revive the dead with a touch but can't touch them again - "them" including the love of his life - without their returning to the realm of the unliving. But then you consider that the series is executive produced (and sometimes directed) by Barry Sonnenfeld, with a vibe that's equal parts Men in Black and Pee-wwe's Playhouse (Paul Ruebens has a supporting role). The dialogue is dead-on deadpan. As Ned explains to Pace's costar, the British actress Anna Friel: "I bake pies and wake the dead. I live a very sheltered life."
"The biggest thing that made me want to do Pushing Daisies was that it is good hearted," Pace says. "What I like about Ned is that although he's a complicated person, he's still a good guy. He's going to do right even when that's hard."
And the financial cushion from the show allows Pace the luxury of indulging his already catholic taste in movie roles. "I'm kind of allowed to sit back and wait until there's something that I really want to do - something that I feel is going to strech me in the right way," he says. "I don't want to be movies that I kind of like."
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