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The first scene Lee Pace shot in “Practical Magic 2” required plenty of prosthetic tattoos — and zero wardrobe.
“I’m lying on this bed, naked,” Pace says with a laugh, “and the two of them come into the room and do some
magic.” In the sequel to 1998’s beloved fantasy film, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman return as two sisters who are witches. They travel to England to seek help from Pace’s professor of magic, who’s under the effects of a curse, immobilized.
This immobilization presented an acting challenge for Pace as a fan of both stars. “I’m laying there with my eyes closed, hearing their voices — their beautiful, distinctive voices.” His voice drips with admiration. “And it was definitely a moment: Wow, this is going to happen.”
Kidman’s and Bullock’s characters marvel at the naked 6-foot-5 Pace, and a rollicking comic set-piece begins, as they use their powers to bring him to life. Pace, who’d been cast over Zoom and arrived on set only days before, was suddenly thrashing about nude with two actresses he’d adored from afar — forcing himself to be in the moment despite it all. His eyes were meant to be closed, but, Pace says, “it was impossible not to peek a little bit.”
Pace is at once wildly prolific — especially lately — and surprisingly unjaded. When he’s discussing “Practical Magic 2,” he seems like a fan as much as an actor. It’s an almost distant memory though: He is meeting up with me in New York in mid-July on a dayslong break between shoots in Prague and New Zealand, having just wrapped Season 4 of Apple TV’s science fiction saga “Foundation,” in which he’s played a succession of powerful, interrelated characters. He’s about to start the next “Lord of the Rings” sequel, 2027’s Andy Serkis-directed “The Hunt for Gollum,” where he’s reprising his role as elf-king Thranduil.
This relentless schedule makes clear that Pace, at 47, is on the brink of a new kind of stardom. He’s been a pathbreaker as a queer leading man. Since his Emmy-nominated breakthrough in the swoony cult hit “Pushing Daisies” from 2007 to 2009, he’s been a franchise-ready character actor, exploring heroism in “Lord of the Rings,” villainy in “Guardians of the Galaxy” and something in between as the complex antihero of AMC’s origin-of-computing drama “Halt and Catch Fire.” Along the way, he’s made pit stops on Broadway in revivals of “The Normal Heart” (2011) and “Angels in America” (2018). He’s been the thinking fan’s thirst trap. But with “Practical Magic 2,” Pace checks the final box — he can be funny too.
Part of the humor is that Pace, so physically daunting, is far less powerful than the sisters. Instead, he gets the chance to be grounded, wry and, once his Dr. Ian Wright wakes up and settles into the story, yearningly romantic opposite Bullock. Her character’s curse is that any man she loves will die, setting up a painfully high-stakes will-they-or-won’t-they.
Seated at one of his favorite restaurants in lower Manhattan, Pace is, unavoidably, massive. It’s the first thing one notices about him, even before his diaphanous, drapey garments — like what Jonathan Anderson might design for Tatooine Fashion Week. Pace demurs when asked about his height: He’s only ever been himself, after all, so he doesn’t feel tall. “I don’t even always know it,” he says, “but then I see a picture, and I’m like, I’m a monster!” These last words are delivered in a conspiratorial whisper; he has a surprisingly soft-spoken cadence that makes anyone in conversation lean in closer. Once they do, they tend to find broad-ranging references to film, theater, literature and philosophy from a mind not content to sit still.
“Something about his voice is sensual, disarming and frightening at the same time,” his friend Colman Domingo says. (They appeared together in last year’s “The Running Man,” in which Pace played a masked killer hunting Glen Powell’s protagonist.) “He’s devastatingly gorgeous, and when he speaks to you, it’s as if he’s speaking only to you. You always feel like he’s telling you a secret. He’s always a little naughty.”
Learning to work around his body was a challenge for Pace at first. His first major onscreen credit was in the 2003 Showtime film “Soldier’s Girl,” as Calpernia Addams, a real-life trans woman who falls in love with an Army private. Pace, early on, told director Frank Pierson, “I don’t know how I make my big body do this.” Pierson, according to Pace, said, “You need to believe you’re a woman. And really fall in love — believe you are.”
Pace practiced that once again on the Leavesden set of “Practical Magic 2,” outside London. “There’s technique involved, but it’s fun to fall in love,” Pace says. “It’s fun to see the best in someone and see them smile back. It’s pretty simple to me.” The sequel marked a bit of sunshine amid the dark universes in which Pace often romps. “I always think it’s funny when you hear actors say, ‘Oh, the kissing scenes are the worst.’” He grins. “I think they’re great.”
Pace makes friends on set easily, in part because he wears his characters lightly. “I didn’t realize it was the same guy who was in the mask in the rehearsals, he had such menace in his body,” says Domingo. “Then meeting him, he’s so lithe, like a dancer — elegant and romantic.”
Some of Pace’s earliest friendships were rooted in acting too. At his high school in suburban Houston, he found himself in an intense theater program. “There was this culture among the students: reading the plays very seriously, reading Uta Hagen and Stanislavsky.” (I ask whether he’s read Susan Choi’s 2019 novel “Trust Exercise,” about tensions among high school theater students in Houston. He has, of course.) Pace and his classmates read reviews of Broadway shows they’d never see, like the 1993 staging of “Angels in America” and the 1995 revival of “The Heiress,” with its much-heralded Cherry Jones star turn. Now, Jones will appear on the forthcoming season of “Foundation,” due next year. “I laughed about the fact that I knew her as a legendary person before even seeing her work!” Pace says.
Jones says she’d never heard Pace’s story about Houston-area teens venerating her. But she wasn’t surprised. “Far, far from the lights of Broadway, it would be a thrilling thing,” the Tennessee-raised actress says. “If I had read a review about Colleen Dewhurst, I would have had the same reaction, I’m sure.” She shares an affinity with Pace as strivers stuck, early on, somewhere they felt they might not quite fit in: “We’re both from Southern states that start with the letter ‘T.’”
Jones and Pace are, more specifically, both queer artists who emerged from the Deep South. One night, after they first met, Jones asked Pace, “How did you deal with that, growing up in Texas?” She remembers him saying, “I didn’t give a fuck what anybody thought.”
“That’s the essence of the man,” she goes on. “He has a joy and a confidence. The greatest trailblazers of all are oblivious to any slings and arrows. Anything coming their way, they don’t even bother with them.”
Oblivious may be overstating the case slightly. Pace remains wounded by a media imbroglio that happened during his “Angels in America” run in 2018, when a profile writer for W Magazine asked him his sexual orientation. Pace acknowledged that he’d dated both men and women, but called the question “intrusive,” kicking off a debate over the concept of outing and whether Pace had been outed unfairly.
His time in the play was already intense: Playing Joe Pitt, an ambitious but closeted Mormon Republican, Pace felt so inside his character that the verbal blows he exchanged with castmates really landed. “There were scenes where it’s a fight happening, but you are fighting,” he says. “I’m proud of that work, even though it hurt to be called a liar. It was hard to walk in his shoes.” Joe, hiding his true self, was accurately called out. And Pace felt as if the media were suddenly making the same accusation about him. “Why do I have to make some kind of statement about myself?” he asks. “You don’t want to be called a liar, but I received advice early on that if you want to have longevity as an actor — play the characters, do the work.”
Playwright Tony Kushner had long marveled at Pace’s ability to embody contradiction: In the casting process for 2012’s “Lincoln,” which Kushner wrote, Pace got the part of the charismatic, virulently pro-slavery congressman Fernando Wood. “Wouldn’t it be great if instead of having a villain, we had someone odd, delightful, charming and witty?” Kushner recalls thinking. As for the sphere of privacy around Pace that came under threat during “Angels,” Kushner says, “He’s an actor who has become famous and celebrated at a moment when what it means to be an actor and your relationship to the audience has been undergoing all sorts of changes. He’s handling all that very nicely.”
Pace has boundaries, but he’s hardly closed off to the world around him. One of the great pleasures of working on the “Lord of the Rings” movies, he says, is his bond with Ian McKellen, the 87-year-old screen legend who plays Gandalf — and an out gay actor who’s similarly hopped between high fantasy and a life onstage. It’s another pinch-me moment for the kid from suburban Houston, who once drove into the city to see McKellen’s 1995 film “Richard III.” “What was it like doing ‘Amadeus’?” Pace remembers asking him. “Tell me about Magneto. Tell me about producing ‘Richard III.’ To say it’s school is not enough. To say that it’s falling in love — it’s not enough.”
Acting can be difficult, but love is the easy part. I ask Pace about his relationship to clothing — like the baffling, dazzling outfit he’s wearing at lunch — and get an answer that’s less about the craft of dressing oneself and more about what we owe one another. What do clothes mean to him? Pace explains that his husband, fashion executive Matthew Foley, will often pause and tell people, “Thank you for your elegance.” Pace knows what he means. He begins to quote the English poet John Milton about what different types of garments mean in different settings, but decides to explain it a simpler way. “When you see a beautiful woman dressed …” he trails off. “Thank you! You’ve made my day!”
And his day was made, time and again, by Kidman and Bullock. “They’re so cool in this movie,” Pace says, sounding more like the nose-pressed-against-glass Texan than the Milton-scholar movie star. “It’s, like, everything you want.”
Pace has no particular expectation for where the film will take him, although — whether or not “Practical Magic 2” can harness the same nostalgic stardust that “The Devil Wears Prada 2” did earlier this year — it may open up new career possibilities. But Pace doesn’t have any next role in mind. What matters is a scene partner with whom he can build a relationship. “Who will be the man that I play, or woman, or alien? Right now, it’s a blank slate.”
Which suits him just fine. “When you’re trying to entertain the masses, people can put labels on a job that doesn’t need labels,” says friend and former co-star Powell. “What’s really brilliant about Lee is that he fights that at every turn. He’s truly chasing interest — his own interest.” Powell notes just how often Pace obscures himself (including, in “Practical Magic 2,” his shroud of fake tattoos): “For being the most handsome man in Hollywood, he sure loves masks.”
But Pace needed to hide less, perhaps, for “Practical Magic 2.” The romantic tones represented a chance to think about love, not war. On-screen, he’s often been powerful and threatening, but in life, he’s thinking about matters of the heart. This private actor, explaining it, lets me in a little. “I don’t think about love in the abstract,” he says. “I think about the people. Love is a feeling, a chemistry with someone — an agreement. Let’s be a little more open with each other. I trust you. Let’s trust.” He laughs. “Still — it’s just the greatest riddle, isn’t it?”
