Morning Man Encore: Lee Pace!

Originally posted Jan 26, 2010

Fans of Pushing Daisies are still mourning the cancellation of that wonderful show after just two seasons. But its talented and handsome leading man, Lee Pace, is just getting started.

By the time he took on the role of Ned on Daisies, a pie maker with the power to bring dead people back to life, Lee had already made a major splash In 2003’s Soldier’s Girl in the role of Calpernia Addams, a transgender woman dating Army soldier Barry Winchell (Troy Garity) who was murdered because of his sexuality and his relationship with Addams.

“I didn’t come to the audition dressed in drag, I was just wearing a T-shirt and jeans,” Lee told me in 2008. “I knew how to connect and mean what I say. I don’t know how to play a drag queen.”

After he was cast, he told director Frank Pierson and 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. All I had to do was focus on is falling in love. After that, the make-up 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 and the movie dramatized his research of the film. The movie had the misfortune of being released a year after a nearly identical film, Capote, won Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Oscar for his portrayal of the famed writer.

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.

“We shot a sequence in Waco and I did this drive back with him and he was on the phone talking to someone about the Bond thing,” Lee remembered. “It was all coming together at that time. He was great to work with, he absolutely transformed himself.”

Lee was dazzling opposite Amy Adams in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day and has a nice scene with Colin Firth in the current release A Single Man and a role in the romantic comedy When In Rome which opens on Friday.