Lee Pace has made a career out of transformation, but the latest Flaunt cover story finds the actor thinking about what survives underneath it. Photographed by Doug Inglish (Atelier Management) and styled by Michael Fisher (The Wall Group), Pace covers the magazine’s Chasing the Sun issue. Speaking with Leah Commandeur, Pace is back in New Zealand filming “The Hunt for Gollum,” reprising his role as Thranduil more than a decade after “The Hobbit.”
Lee Pace for Flaunt
“To be a part of this is meaningful,” Pace says of returning to Middle-earth. “You know there’s people who have loved these stories and watched them multiple times.” The homecoming arrives as his career continues to expand elsewhere. Pace has stepped into an executive producer role for season four of “Foundation,” where playing iterations of the cloned emperor Cleon raises its own questions about identity and inheritance. “The riddle is this, they think they’re different, but they’re actually the same,” he explains.
That question of identity has followed Pace through a varied body of work, from “Soldier’s Girl” and “Pushing Daisies” to Marvel villains and Tolkien royalty. Looking back at “Soldier’s Girl,” he remembers believing the character “couldn’t have been further from who I am,” only to watch the film and recognize himself. “I looked a little bit different, but I wasn’t actually.”
Now, with “Practical Magic 2” alongside Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman in theaters, Pace remains drawn to stories that allow reality to bend. “We can kind of just try them on and feel our way through it inside of our imagination,” he says. For an actor associated with elves, emperors, vampires, and villains, the connecting thread is surprisingly simple. Transformation has become another way of finding the person underneath.
