Lee Pace
Spotlight By: Andrea Tuccillo
AndreaTuccillo@TheCinemaSource.com
How to sum up rising star Lee Pace? He’s daring (he played a woman in the television film Soldier’s Girl), has an adventurous spirit (he traveled the world for his role in The Fall and loves to do his own stunts) and he’s a dreamy romantic (see his roles in Pushing Daisies and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day). Oh, and did I mention he’s super nice, really, really tall and has a killer smile?
His new film The Fall was made under truly unique circumstances. Pace plays a depressed man named Roy who’s confined to a hospital bed in 1920’s Los Angeles. When a curious little Romanian girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) who’s recovering from a broken arm wanders into his room, he begins telling her story. The film cuts back and forth from the little girl’s imagination to reality. What makes it unique? Director Tarsem Singh (The Cell) filmed it in at least 26 different countries including South Africa and India (virtually none of the fantastic shots are green screen), he made it with money from his own pocket, and perhaps most interesting of all he had a very unusual request for Pace. For the sake of the character and the performances of the actors around him, Singh told Pace to pretend he really couldn’t walk.
“I was in a wheelchair for the first two months of it and that was Tarsem’s idea that everyone would call me Roy which was my character’s name and I would be in a wheelchair and everyone thought I was truly disabled,” Pace says. “I really think that that helped Catinca not be afraid of me and feel like I was approachable to her. The first scene where she comes into my hospital room, that’s the first time we met. It’s really the first time we met. She came in and when you see her lingering in the doorway that’s her thinking, ‘I kind of know my blocking and I’ve heard a lot about him but should I go in there and do it now?’ So that all is truly real but then we got to know each other and she would wheel me into lunch and go get me dessert and we’d spend a lot of time together like that so we would get really close. When we’d do those scenes where she’d get up on the bed, we’d pull the curtain around. She had no idea she was being filmed. We’d just kind of talk and get her to be herself.”
The young actress is a marvel to watch because of her innocence. Pace recalls, “There was a time when they’d cut holes to get our coverage in the curtain and she started complaining about Tarsem about something and everyone in the next room laughed cause they were watching it and she kind of goes ‘What are they laughing at?’”
Although Tarsem’s little wheelchair trick seemed to be working for the film, it wasn’t
