17 Dec 2014 12:20 PM PT
Jim Parsons and Lee Pace in the stage production of ‘The Normal Heart’ Image: playbill.com
Lee Pace knows how to pick a project. In the last few years alone, the 35-year-old Texas-raised actor has appeared in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning Lincoln, Peter Jackson’s Hobbit franchise, and Guardians of the Galaxy. He also fronts AMC’s hour-long drama about the birth of computers in Silicon Prairie, Halt and Catchfire, which will film its second season next year, and recently wrapped Stephen Frears’ Lance Armstrong biopic Icon (he plays Armstrong’s former team manager Bill Stapleton).
Over Thanksgiving break, Pace spoke to his good friend Jim Parsons, with whom he acted in The Normal Heart on Broadway.
LEE PACE: Hey Jim.
JIM PARSONS: Hi Lee, how are you?
PACE: I’m good. Thank you so much for doing this.
PARSONS: Are you kidding? Any chance to talk to you is always an opportunity worth taking. Interview is here. We have spoken. They do exist, but if you need them please call, otherwise I guess I’ll be your guide. Good luck to you.
PACE: [laughs] God help me.
PARSONS: Where are you right now?
PACE: I’m in Austin.
PARSONS: So you’re with your family.
PACE: Yeah, I am. I came down to my folks’ farm. Just got in last night. It’s always lots of kids, lots of dogs.
PARSONS: When you are in Austin with your family, do you work? I don’t mean acting, although you have that covered fine. Do you bale hay or feed cows?
PACE: Well, there’s no hay or cows, but my dad is always working on projects for me to do. He’s got lots for me to carry to and from. He usually has some equipment that he either needs me to watch him operate or he needs me to boss around, whether it’s a new tractor, sawmill.
PARSONS: But you’re handy. It’s one of the things I like about you.
PACE: Oh, thanks.
PARSONS: I thought I should say that upfront, for what little insight it might give people to you, that you are one of my favorite people I’ve ever gotten to know through work. I would say you’re the favorite, but I feel like that would alienate certain people so I’ll just put you in a group of favorites. You came out and stayed with me and Todd [Spivak, Parson’s boyfriend] in L.A. for a week about a year after we did Normal Heart, the play. I never, at any point, got ready for you to leave. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a guest stay and I wasn’t like, “Well, thank god that’s over.” Even if you love them.
PACE: I’ll be honest, Jim, I didn’t want to leave.
PARSONS: Normally I don’t like to talk to people in the morning and that was oddly my favorite time while you were there— having coffee in the morning.
PACE: We’d try to talk news stuff, have coffee, and then Todd would come up.
PARSONS: There were these periods of silence where you’d kind of journal while I was in my morning routine or whatever and then we’d talk again.
PACE: This is us.
PARSONS: It was good rhythm. We have things in common, obviously, like Texas. We both went to the same school district for high school and our birthdays are really close—not in years. I’m your elder, don’t forget it.
PACE: [laughs]
PARSONS: So we have those things in common, but we’ve got these differences, like you being handy, more outdoorsy. Frankly, I think you’re more fun than I am. This is true. Do you not feel the same way?
PACE: You’re very levelheaded. Sometimes I can get hotter, more angry about something. I think you avoid this path generally.
PARSONS: Yeah, probably, but that’s because I don’t like confrontation. It’s not because I’m some sort of princely royalty that manages to keep his emotions in check.
PACE: Yeah, I don’t like confrontation.
PARSONS: We’ve had few to none, which is nice. How did we actually meet? Do you have any idea?
PACE: I feel like we meet before either one of us had gone out to L.A., in New York. It could’ve been an audition or something.
PARSONS: I don’t know what we were auditioning for, but I think you had just booked a pilot that was going to be a remake of The Monkeys.
PACE: No.
PARSONS: Oh yes.
PACE: I think I was auditioning for it. Did I book that?
PARSONS: Well, maybe you didn’t, but we were talking about it.
PACE: I remember our paths would cross on the Warner Brothers lot because I was shooting Pushing Daises, and you were shooting Big Bang Theory and the stages were next to each other.
PARSONS: But it was Normal Heart when we got to really talk-talk.
PACE: That could not have been a more unique or extreme experience.
PARSON: And funny, too, because it was a situation that normally you don’t dream about, which is sharing dressing rooms as an adult. In this case, I count myself almost as lucky with the dressing room situation as I was to get cast in that play. It was you and John Benjamin Hickey, and on the same floor Joe Mantello and Ellen Barkin. There couldn’t have been a more entertaining group of people to spend the run of the show backstage with then on that floor.
PACE: It was unbelievable. We would play music until about five minutes before the show would begin—we had a disco [to] Nicki Minaj—and then the show would begin and it was a very serious play. Then the play was over and we’d turn up the music again and people would be backstage.