Almost 14 years have come and gone since Lee Pace was first introduced to the world as Thranduil the Elvenking, in Peter Jackson’s screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. On our call, he is back in New Zealand, a week into filming the next installment of The Lord Of The Rings universe: The Hunt for Gollum. From my screen, it appears as if he’s sipping his coffee in the depths of Middle-earth; moss-dampened rocks peep through the low-hanging early fog of his winter morning, combatting with my bright summer sunset in what feels like a whole universe away.

Pace’s is a face widely known across a multitude of fandoms. Some were introduced to him via the Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 2 in 2012, where he plays free-spirited vampire Garrett who joins the Cullen’s gang of allies against the Volturi. Others know him from the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Ronan the Accuser; or as pie-maker/resurrectionist Ned in Pushing Daisies which went on to earn him an Emmy nomination in 2008. More recently as the voice of Invincible’s Thragg; in 2006, in Tarsem Singh’s visually striking The Fall; and in 2004, his Golden Globe-nominated performance in Soldier’s Girl.

Pace has not always inhabited Middle-earth or space. It was Oklahoma, Texas, then New York for Juilliard.  “I was like a nerdy theater kid. I didn’t really know much about the world other than what went on in my head,” he says. “And I remember thinking as we kind of went through uptown that New York looked like Sesame Street. That’s what it looked like to me.”

New York is still his home all these years later. No longer a green teenager but a lauded actor, husband and proud upstate farm owner. “I’ve got too many memories all over that city. They’re good ones, they’re bad ones, but I’m never going to leave them,” he tells me, oscillating between past and present before the sun is yet to fully break over his shoulder. He’s spent most of this year away from home, starting the year off in Prague to reprise his role (or more aptly roles) as his next iteration of Cleon I’s clones for Season 4 of Apple TV’s sci-fi epic Foundation, which follows a group of exiles who are tasked with saving humanity during the fall of the Galactic Empire. This next season also sees Pace formally step into an Executive Producer position for the first time. “I’ve been very lucky with Foundation to work with David Goyer. I could set myself up with a character that I was like, okay, I think it would be really cool if we do this like this. Can I propose this angle on this term?” he says. “And that’s what led to getting that Executive Producer credit.” 

Season 4 will be big, he teases, ramping up the complex cerebral and emotional scope of his character even more from the juicy ending of the last season. Playing multiple clones sounds complicated enough without throwing in the high-stakes intergalactic politics (which are not so far away from those here on Earth) in the story created by Isaac Asimov. “The riddle is this, they think they’re different, but they’re actually the same,” he says. “Like, you think you’re different than your parents, but are you? Or are you a continuation of what they inherited from their parents and their parents before them?” 

Now he’s on the move again in Wellington, about to head to set for another day of filming in a fantastical world. The realm created by Tolkien is one of his particular favorites both on and off set, and playing the Elvenking is “one of the biggest privileges of my career,” he says. Twenty-five years on from the first on-screen trip to Middle-earth, many of the same cast and crew are still clocking in to build this magical world that is coveted by so many, making the filming experience a homecoming of sorts. “This little group of people who made it—I mean, it’s a big little group of people,” he laughs. “They created a cinematic vocabulary for the first time. There are ways that Peter Jackson filmed and staged the epicness of [The Lord of the Rings] that had never really been done before. It didn’t just happen. They made it happen.” 

Stepping back into that nothing-short-of-fabulous icy blond wig is more than just jumping back into the shoes of an old friend, but it’s giving new life to a character that fans cherish—made evident by Instagram comments saying This is the greatest day of my life and Welcome back, my king. So no pressure at all.  “To be a part of this is meaningful, you know there’s people who have loved these stories and watched them multiple times,” he says. “To make another, there’s a challenge to it absolutely, but it’s a fun one.”

It’s a difficult task to imagine not being able to instantaneously recognize Pace in a role but he’s skillfully mastered the art of shapeshifting before our eyes. See him, terrifyingly unrecognizable, skin blue and mottled black, in Guardians of the Galaxy. In 2025’s The Running Man, he plays chief hunter of a group of professional assassins, McCone, who dons a mask which allows him to “project the kind of violent masculinity that he wants,” he says.  

His ability to effortlessly escape into characters results in the breadth of the variety of roles he plays to stretch wide, as underneath all them, be it villain, king, vampire—the connective tissue between them all is the man who plays them. “I feel very fortunate to have been able to play lots of different kinds of characters,” he says. “The very first movie I did with this movie was called Soldier’s Girl, where I played a woman. I remember thinking when I finished that it couldn’t have been further from who I am. But I remember watching it back and I just saw myself [...] I looked a little bit different, but I wasn’t actually.” 

We revisit his role as Joe Pitt in the 2018 Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which explores the lives of a group of characters during the early years of the AIDS crisis. Like Pace, I remember studying the epic as a student and it implanting itself in a corner of my mind, refusing to leave all these years later. “I feel challenged and blessed to experience those things as pretend, because I feel like I’ve learned something from that experience without actually having to do it. Of course, it’s not the same thing as really experiencing those things, but that’s one of the beautiful things of telling stories, particularly in theater,” he tells me.

I ask him if he’s thought of doing theater again to make up for last time, to catch him closest to the theatre kid version of himself he mentioned earlier in our conversation. He would love to one day, he tells me. “There are those moments where everyone holds their breath and is under the spell. [Everyone] is held in that moment of shared emotional conscious space. There are times it can be more like church than anything else.”

What’s next for Pace? In early 2025, Warner Bros. announced that the cult movie that is equal parts cozy and witchy, Practical Magic (1998) will be getting a sequel. Pace will join Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as magic specialist Ian, who, by the sound of things, is aptly obsessed with the Owens sisters. “Basically the Owens sisters are like, ‘You’re coming with us. We’re going to go do some witchy things.’ And that was my experience with Sandra and Nicole. Basically, they’re like, ‘Let’s go,’” he says. “They’re both such gifted and natural comedians. It was incredible to watch them work separately and the pairing of the two of them. It’s magical, actually.” Pun fully intended. 

Pace has become something of a generational face of fiction, always finding new ways to explore what it means to be human in these far-away galaxies and beneath the robes of an Elf King, but that thread through it all still remains. “I think there’s something exciting to me about the way that stories can play on your mind in an unserious way. We can kind of just try them on and feel our way through it inside of our imagination in kind of a more subconscious space that doesn’t necessarily have to be reportage. That’s what Shakespeare was approaching. You know, he didn’t have spaceships. And I don’t think he had dragons, but he certainly had witches,” he grins. “Very memorable witches.”

Photographed by Doug Inglish

Styled by Michael Fisher

Written by Leah Commandeur

Grooming: Coco Ullrich at A-Frame Agency

Flaunt Film: Jackson Mach

Style Assistant: Christina Corso

Market Assistant: Bridget McDonald

Production Assistant: Marley Brennan

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