Whether or not they have seen him act, I’m sure that nearly every person who is chronically online knows one key fact about Lee Pace: that he is a whopping 6 feet and 5 inches tall. I don’t think anyone has described the impact of his height better than Amy Adams, telling Elle Magazine in 2008 that she was so distracted by him on set because “he’s a lot of boy.”
Whenever the 43-year-old posts photos of himself, a horny internet meltdown follows mere milliseconds after.
Lately, multiple images have gloriously illustrated just how tall Pace is. Upon seeing his photoshoot with Mr. Porter, which captures him posing in various locations, including a door frame that is nearly his height and on a balcony while donning a black robe and Balenciaga slides, my first thought was, “Wow, so tall.”(Take a shot every time you see the word “tall” in this piece. There’s no better thing to toast to than Tall Lee Pace.)
In photos from the recent New York City premiere of Bodies Bodies Bodies, he towers over every single cast member. (I must also point out that at said premiere, he wore an unbuttoned silk shirt and gold chain, which likely caused everyone in attendance heart palpitations. It was also roughly 110 degrees that night in Brooklyn. Lee Pace’s beautiful tallness is now a risk for causing mass heatstroke.)
When Pace shared a selfie with the caption “VAXXED” last May, it sent the internet into shambles. Pace’s looks alone could convince a significant amount of people to get vaccinated—or do literally anything else for that matter—if they hadn’t already planned on doing so.
Not only does Lee Pace display the physical qualities of a dream man—hot and, you guessed it, tall—but he’s also a severely underrated Julliard-trained actor finally getting the appreciation he deserves, regardless of if online thirst is the catalyst for people taking notice.
Pace has been in the industry for well over two decades, building a fantastic career out spanning film, television, and theater. He has appeared in several major franchises, from playing a silver-haired elf in The Hobbit to Marvel—only he can make a blue villain in the MCU look even the slightest bit attractive—and even Twilight, in which he played a sexy (duh) vampire who lacked a solid backstory in Breaking Dawn: Part 2.
While he has delivered stellar turns in films like The Fall and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, and especially in Broadway’s 2018 revival of Angels in America, the majority of Pace’s best work can be found on TV. Those of us who have seen every criminally overlooked series he has starred in have always known how charming Pace really is. It’s about time the rest of you caught on.
In Bryan Fuller’s whimsical, albeit tragically short-lived, Pushing Daisies, Pace plays a pie maker named Ned. Ned has the ability to bring people back from the dead through touch, but can’t touch them again or else they’ll die for good. He resurrects and proceeds to fall in love with his childhood sweetheart, Chuck (Anna Friel), and they spend the rest of the series navigating the turbulence of their relationship from a distance. It’s no wonder, given the subject matter, that the series found a second life at the beginning of the pandemic when it began streaming on HBO Max.
Pushing Daisies was a unique show that seamlessly blended genres like romantic comedy and murder mystery, while unabashedly leaning into campy territory. Ned is a sweet and adorable character played to perfection by a puppy dog-eyed Pace, who earned an Emmy nomination for his performance. But it’s a shame that we never got to spend more time in the show’s delightfully quirky world. To any studio executives reading this: please put my Tall Man in another rom-com, I’m begging.
Even more underrated is Wonderfalls, Fuller’s 2004 one-season wonder that could easily be dubbed a spiritual cousin to Pushing Daisies. The series, which centers on a young woman navigating adulthood, marked Pace’s first major television role. He played the central character’s brother Aaron, a laid-back PhD student. While it was a supporting role, it was evident immediately that he was on his way to becoming one of television’s finest actors.
It would be a sin for me to go without mentioning Halt and Catch Fire, a prestige tech drama that was poised to be the next Mad Men for AMC but instead flew under the radar throughout its four-season run from 2014-2017, despite being a critical darling. Halt and Catch Fire may have started out as a show about the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, but it evolved into a much more human and heartbreaking portrait of failure, success, friendship, and more by its final season.
In the series, Pace plays Joe MacMillan, a Steve Jobs and Don Draper-esque man who charms his way into a software company in Texas in an attempt to manufacture his own IBM PC clone. Had any other actor been cast in the role, Joe could have easily come across as a one-dimensional, insufferable jerk. But in the hands of Pace, who imbues the character with charisma and humanity, the handsome asshole is transformed into someone we grew to like and root for as the series progressed.
Late last year, Pace was once again put on everyone’s radar with the release of Apple TV+’s sci-fi series Foundation. I must admit, I’m still not fully convinced that this show exists—my knowledge of it begins and ends with Pace’s character being called an “Intergalactic Emperor Daddy” by fans. But I’m immensely thankful to it for blessing us with behind-the-scenes pictures of a tanned and shirtless Pace. I hadn’t even been aware of Foundation until Pace changed the trajectory of my life by dropping the photos himself on what was an otherwise uneventful Friday afternoon. While I may never watch Foundation, even for thirst-watching purposes, at least I’ll always have these beautiful images to stare at.
This month, Pace returned to the silver screen in Halina Reijn’s part-slasher, part-murder mystery Bodies Bodies Bodies. He plays Greg, the older Tinder boyfriend of scene-stealer Rachel Sennott’s podcaster Alice. (It’s a perfect pairing for Gen Z-ers like myself, who would enter an age gap relationship in the blink of an eye if the guy looked anything like Pace). Greg serves mostly as a side character in Bodies Bodies Bodies, existing to entertain Alice and her friends and to open a bottle of champagne with a sword (it truly can’t get any hotter than that), and in turn entertains us with his pretty face and himbo energy.
Pace is aware of his hotness and the drastic effect that it has on those of us online, but he’s also not the type to post cringe-y thirst traps. Instead, his Instagram is composed of aesthetically pleasing selfies and pictures, mostly shot on film, of him living his life unbothered while always looking effortlessly beautiful. Pace is famously a private dude who minds his own business by living on a 110-acre farm in upstate New York, but still manages to revel in the attention his looks receive whenever he gets the chance.
There is nothing sexier than a man who subtly knows that his looks could kill. Since he is a married and unreachable celebrity, he’s also someone that none of us can have. And you know what they say: There’s nothing more attractive than a guy you have absolutely no chance with.
He’s stylish—I highly doubt that any other man could pull off shorts at the Met Gala as well as he did last year—has bushy eyebrows, and exudes cool guy energy. Have I mentioned that he’s also really, really tall? As someone nearly a foot shorter than Pace, I would like to respectfully climb him like a tree.
The state of the world may constantly be in shambles, but it’s a much better place as long as Lee Pace (6’5”) exists to unite society.
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