Lee Pace didn’t make Entertainment Weekly’s recent list of Hollywood’s candidates for the next-generation A-list. But the photogenic “Pushing Daisies” star is definitely a comer.
With the arrival of Tarsem’s multinational fantasy “The Fall” Pace was offered the opportunity to look back to when his career was just beginning to pop. The six foot four Pace, now 29, has become a familiar face with the quirky series “Pushing Daisies.” As Ned, who can bring people back from the dead with a single touch, a role created specifically for him. “Daisies” returns this fall.
It was four years ago when Tarsem was casting his self-financed fable and Pace’s only substantial credit at that time was an acclaimed turn as a drag queen who precipitates a military tragedy in the fact-based “Soldier’s Girl” which co-starred Jane Fonda’s son Troy Garity.
Tarsem, the innovative video filmmaker who debuted with 2000’s “The Cell,” gambled on this unknown and won. As “Fall” arrived Pace was just onscreen as Amy Adams’ poor but true love in “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.” Later this year he stars opposite Sarah Michelle Gellar in “Possession.”
For Pace “The Cell,” which Tarsem spent years filming in 24 countries, remains a treasured memory. All his scenes were filmed in South Africa as a stand-in for WWI-era California “There has been no studio, no producers. Tarsem’s had to answer to no one,” Pace said. “It’s a story he’s been working on since before ‘The Cell.’”
“The Fall” casts Pace, a Julliard graduate, as cowboy-turned-stuntman Roy Walker. “It’s 1915. He’s in that first wave of making pictures, a cowboy who is given 20 bucks to ride a horse off of a bridge,” the actor explained. “That’s when the whole movement was, ‘Can we film people doing crazy things?’ For example, riding on top of planes, jumping off trains. That makes a spectacle that people want to pay 25 cents to go see.”
Roy’s stunt has left him gravely injured and hospitalized where he meets a little girl (Catinca Untaru, Tarsem’s Romanian discovery). “He starts telling a story to a little girl — it’s a story about cinema in a way to a little girl who has never seen a movie before. When he starts telling her the story, which is kind of a classic western with a masked bandit and Indian, she imagines the Indian as an East Indian as opposed to a Native American Indian. She also imagines it in a pre-cinematic way.”
For Pace, who is also the hero of the “movie” created in the little girl’s imagination, increased visibility manes nonstop international travel for publicity and promotion. This bachelor’s personal life? “None,” he replied. “Yeah, I work a lot. I got my dog, I read on planes, and that’s my life.”
