Hey guys, spending a little more time here on the Coaxial side of the site, celebrating the beginning of the end for one of my favorite series of late, AMC’s “Halt and Catch Fire,” which begins its final run of episodes tonight, August 19, with the premiere of the season’s first two episodes. Last week, I got a chance to chat with a few of the creatives for “Halt and Catch Fire,” and I’ve got another find specimen for you today.
Actor Lee Pace, who plays the show’s resident tech visionary Joe MacMillan, has had an incredibly varied, 15-year career in both film and television. Many know him from his earlier series work on such shows as “Wonderfalls” and “Pushing Daisies,” but I first noticed him in the groundbreaking Showtime film SOLDIER’S GIRL, in which Pace played a transexual nightclub performer. Some of his standout work after that included parts in such films as INFAMOUS, THE GOOD SHEPHERD, MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY, and A SINGLE MAN. I first interviewed Pace about 10 years ago for a fantastic piece of cinema called THE FALL in which he plays an injured, silent-era stuntman, spinning tales in the hospital to a little girl also bedridden.
Since THE FALL, Pace’s career has picked up considerably with roles in Steven Spielberg’s LINCOLN; the final TWILIGHT film, BREAKING DAWN, PART 2; all three HOBBIT movies, as the Elf king Thranduil; and GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY as Ronan the Accuser. And perhaps most intriguingly, he’s weeks away from beginning production on DRIVEN, in which he’ll play scandalized automotive industry exec John DeLorean.
Pace is a great thinker and conversationalist, and it was terrific reconnecting with him after so long. He’s certainly one of the big reason I started watching “Halt and Catch Fire” in the first place, and he has a lot to say about the show, his character, and the relationships he formed over its four seasons. Please enjoy my talk with Lee Pace…
Lee Pace: Hey, Steve. How are you?
Capone: Hey, Lee. Good to talk to you.
LP: Yeah. You too.
Capone: There’s no way you would possibly remember this, but about 10 years ago, we had an epic conversation about THE FALL when it finally came out.
LP: Oh, yeah! I love that movie so much. I'm so proud of it. It's my favorite, favorite thing, that movie.
Capone: I love introducing people to it who haven't seen it—kids and adults. Maybe a year after that conversation, I moderated a Q&A after the film at Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival. And he brought in Catinca [Untaru, who played the film’s young lead Alexandria ] and her family for the screening.
LP: Oh, really? Wow! You know, she's directing movies now.
Capone: Are you kidding? I didn't know that.
LP: Yeah, Tarsem told me she did a short movie about two years ago, which I just think is the coolest thing. She's so special.
Capone: That's amazing, and she was so much older than she was in the movie when I met her, and now I can't even imagine. So just to give you sense of how much I love “Halt and Catch Fire,” I don't even write TV stuff for our site, but I had to make an exception for these interviews. I’ve already seen the first three episodes of this season, just to let you know what you can talk about safely.
LP: Cool. What do you think? It's different this season, isn't it?
Capone: It's different every season. That's the whole thing. And a large part of the reason it's different every season is because Joe is a different character every season.
LP: That's so true, yeah. [laughs]
Capone: He's shedding his skin each season. He's never the same guy. How would you describe who he is as season four gets rolling, because he seems like he's in a pretty good place; he's being social again and talking to his old friends and working with his old friends. How would you characterize where he is?
LP: Yeah. That mutability of Joe is my favorite thing about playing the character. If you asked me first season what he was about, I would've said his ambition. He's about the technology. He's about innovation. He's about Joe MacMillan. That's what I would say that the character is about, and now I would say the character has just been defined by this transformative journey that he's been on. The Joe of first season never would have anticipated the impact the past ten years has had on his character and his life. I just love that so much. I've been very inspired by that with the characte, that kind of mutability. The fact that he looks different. The fact that he's thinking about different things and operating in different ways.
In this season, I see a man who has thoroughly failed. He's failed at everything he's attempted. Everything. His marriage has failed. Any company he's tried to be a part of has ended in total destruction, and his reputation is bad. It has left its scar on him, and I think the man that we see now is just humbled in a way.
It's not about the computers anymore. It's not really about the search engine or the browser or any of that stuff anymore. It's about these people that he loves, and he's conscious and aware of it. It's about being able to come into the office every day and see Gordon Clark standing by the coffee machine. And it's so torturous not being able to get Cameron on the phone, because she is essential to him. After she comes back into his life when he thought she was in Japan and gone forever, just to get her to call him back to work out the bugs on the browser was just essential to him.
When that went away, when the browser falls apart, it's not about the browser falling apart. It's about losing the people that he loves. The only people that he loves, because he doesn't have a family. In this humbled state with Joe, it's becoming very apparent to him how important that is, to have people who care about you in your life, and the possibility that he might have blown it and not made those relationships in his life when he had the opportunity to.
Capone: One of the things I always liked about Joe was that, in the first season especially, he had a bit of a con-artist quality to him, and I think someone might even have accused him of not really understanding the details of the tech, but he knew enough about it to sell it. Now, over the course of these 10 years, he's taught himself the things he needed to know. He took classes, didn't he?
LP: Yeah.
Capone: He's actually gotten to know what it is he's working on, and that's one of the many ways he's reinvented himself.
LP: The thing about the show is that the characters speak from the way… they've got very subjective points of view. So when one character says, "You don't know anything," it's not an empirical truth. It's just the way they feel about it. Joe knew what he needed to know. [laughs] I realize I can be really bad about just defending Joe, but I think he knew what he needed to know. Sorry, I really took the bait on that one.
[Both laugh]
Capone: Are you going to miss coming back to this guy every year?
LP: Yeah, I'll miss him. I've gotten to be very close with him over these years, and I've gotten a lot of affection for him and these characters. I've played him for five years now, going back to the pilot, and that's a long time to be playing a character, thinking about him, and having him influence your life whether you like it or not. And he's a complicated character to have influence your life and the way you think, because he's complicated. Things don't go easily for him, and he doesn't make things easy for himself. So it's been this interesting laboratory for life, in a way, to think about life and hypothesize about life and do some experiments to see what happens to ambition when you put this pressure on it, and what happens to love when you treat it like that.
So yeah, absolutely, I've thought about my own life through the lens of Joe, and, yeah, he's just had this impact on my life having played him for this amount of time. And to work on it the way that we've worked on it because, with the actors, we read every script just ourselves, and we've gotten very, very close these years doing that. We've lived together and we're always talking about the show, even if we're talking about something completely different. And that's been really cool in a way. There's been something really interesting about working in that casual way. There's energy that will pass between me and Mackenzie in the kitchen while we're making breakfast that find their way onto set.
Capone: One of the things that seems inevitable about these relationships is Joe and Gordon. That to me might be the real love story of the show, these two completely different guys still being best friends, and that seems the most inevitable thing at the end of the day.
LP: Yeah. [Executive producer] Melissa Bernstein, she told me this thing earlier this year that I thought made so much sense. She was like, on this show, in this world, she's observed, and these all come down to observations because I feel like we've been finding this thing together over the years. It's like this thing is forming and changing year to year and throughout the season in this way that we're all learning things, investigating and learning things about the characters as we go.
This comment that she made was that the relationships that last on this show are not the love relationships. They're the work relationships. Those are the relationships that actually have a spine to them, and that's just some of the peculiarities of these people. But I do think, yeah, that story of Gordon and Joe, it's so true. Boy, they mean the world to each other at this point, and they’re the only people that could stand each other, to be honest, because they're so difficult, each one of them.
Capone: Can you talk at all just about some big-picture ideas and leaps that will be made over this last season?
LP: The characters of [Gordon’s daughters] Haley and Joanie become important, important parts of this season.
Capone: I talked with Scoot about that. I love that the daughters haven’t just disappeared. I like that we're keeping them, and they're becoming a part of this. I think it's really great.
LP: It's great, and I know for Joe, I've just loved that story line for Joe, because, I mean look, this is a man without a family. And these little girls who he waved the flashlights for, who knows if they even remember it, but he certainly remembers it. Now he's watched them grow up and become little adults, and I think it's one of the huge, meaningful experiences in his life, watching these girls grow up. Joe wants kids, and not that he wants kids. I don't think that he would even feel that he was entitled to have them, or would have the right to have them, or any situation in his life would make that possible, but he's definitely feeling the loss of not having had that experience in his life. It very much informs his relationship with Cameron this season, and with Gordon and Haley, the idea that that might not be an option for him anymore, and it might've been the thing that he was best suited to do, to be a father, to be a mentor.
Capone: Are you still making this DeLorean movie?
LP: Oh yeah.
Capone: I just saw [director] Nick Hamm's most recent film, THE JOURNEY, and I really liked that.
LP: Yeah, it's excellent, isn't it? I really love it, too. I'll be shooting it very soon, like, in a matter of weeks we start.
Capone: Just promise me that it ends with him going in a movie theater and watching BACK TO THE FUTURE for the first time. That has to be the ending.
LP: [laughs] I'm not going to tell you how it ends.
Capone: We know how it ends.
[Both laugh]
LP: No, it’s great. What a fascinating guy DeLorean is. I'm just really loving the research and having a good time putting together a character that is nothing like me. I'm really excited about it. I'm having a really great time working on it. We’re about to start at the beginning of September.
Capone: That soon? You weren't kidding.
LP: Yeah, that’s my job right now is getting myself ready for that movie, and it's such a great script. I love our cast right now, so I'm just really, really excited to start shooting this one. I think it's going to be a really cool one.
Capone: Outside of the headlines, I don't really know that much about him.
LP: I know. That's the fun opportunity with him, too. Because I mention that I'm playing him, and someone will be like, "Is that guy still in jail?" I was like, "No." No one knows what happened to him. He was this big tabloid story for a minute, and then the name exists in this interesting way.
Capone: I don’t even know if he’s dead or alive, to be honest, so I guess that's the first thing I'll learn [he died in 2005].
LP: Yeah, it will be.
Capone: You also just shot a film that Karen Gillan directed, too.
LP: Yeah, at the beginning of this year, Karen directed her first movie. Yeah, so cool. Loved being on set with her and not being blue, not having to destroy the universe with her. But yeah, it was great to work with her as a director. Seeing her act in it and direct at the same time was just a real privilege, because I think she's making something really cool with this movie. I haven't seen it yet, but I think it's going to be really cool. I was really happy she asked me to be a part of it, because it was cool to see her make it.
Capone: Lee, thank you so much. It was really great to talk again and talk about this wonderful show. Best of luck with everything.
LP: Hey, same to you, and thanks for watching it. I really appreciate that. Talk to you soon.
