Twin Cities
by Chris Hewitt
March 6, 2008
Sorry, "Pushing Daisies" fans. That TV show won't have new episodes until fall. But if it's the show's star, Lee Pace, you like, you can see him in a movie that opens today: "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day."
"Miss Pettigrew" is a farce about a down-on-her-luck governess (Frances McDormand) who gets a job playing nursemaid to a ditzy actress (Amy Adams) and who helps the actress figure out she loves a piano-playing nice guy, played by Pace.
The actor says he had to learn to do three things in order to make the movie: "I tried to do this northern English accent, which I stayed in all day. And I had to learn the piano — the only songs I can play are the three I play in the movie. And then, the only other thing I had to do was fall in love with Amy Adams, who is fun and inspiring and comes on the set every day ready to work. So, falling in love with her wasn't very difficult."
Neither was making "Miss Pettigrew."
"I'm not in the movie that much," says Pace. "I was there for two months, but I probably only worked for two weeks of that, on and off. But I have a lot of really fun friends in England. And Anna (his "Daisies" co-star Anna Friel) lives there. We had just finished shooting the 'Pushing Daisies' pilot, and we got along really well and had had all this fun in L.A., so we got to have a lot of fun in England, too."
All that fun actually helped him figure out his character, an upbeat guy who gets caught up in London showbiz during the Depression.
"The movie was about this fun lifestyle, and I went out a lot and made a lot of friends," says Pace, pausing to tell his barking dog, Carl, to quiet down. "I find that's true a lot, that the movie can inform your life. You don't really need to discover what kind of trinkets your character kept in his pockets. Sometimes, you just need to have fun."
That word — "fun" — comes up a lot in conversation with Pace. Work on "Pushing Daisies," for instance? You guessed it.
"I've never been happier than I have been doing 'Pushing Daisies,' " says Pace, who plays a pie maker whose touch can bring the dead back to life. "In our cast, there are no 20-year-olds who are just thrilled that they're famous and that girls are calling them back all the time. We're all older and we're all really grateful to be there, having fun every day."
Sounds like a lot of that fun centers on Friel, whom Pace says is as vivacious in real life as she comes off on the series. "Anna is always coming into my trailer to talk," says Pace. "She likes the idea — Carl, give me a break, please! — Sorry. She likes the idea that our characters are very old-fashioned, romantic-comedy types, sparring with each other, so she always comes into my trailer to watch Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn movies with me."
Pace says all the regular cast members, including Friel, Kristen Chenoweth and Chi McBride, have settled into a groove now that they're figured out who their characters are. And, he jokes, now that they've gotten used to the idea that, no matter who directs each episode, one piece of direction is always the same: "Say it again. But, this time, say it faster and flatter."
Those two adjectives are designed to help the actors achieve the unique tone of "Pushing Daisies," which has a sweetness tinged with an edge. The tone of "Pettigrew" is different — "fast and fizzy" might be closer — but Pace says all of his characters come to him via pretty much the same combination of research and contemplation.
"You never really turn your mind off when you're engaged by a project, whatever it is," says Pace. "So, you're always thinking about how they react or what they want. That's the kind of work I do by myself, when I'm riding my bike."
Which is to say that, yet again, Pace likes to have fun while he's technically at work.
Source
|
