Lee Pace (Kinda) Comes Out and Sounds Off on the Importance of Gay Actors Playing Gay Roles
When discussing the importance of gay actors playing gay roles, Lee Pace — the 38-year-old American actor best known for playing Ned in the ABC series Pushing Daisies and starring in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 and The Hobbit trilogy — recently admitted in an interview with W magazine that he has dated both men and women. Yeah, Lee Pace comes out (or does he) in the recent interview.
W magazine reports:
Pace added that he feels it’s important for gay actors to play the gay roles in both plays, but stopped short of labeling himself. He seemed a bit flustered and surprised by the question. “I’ve dated men. I’ve dated women,” he explained. “I don’t know why anyone would care. I’m an actor and I play roles. To be honest, I don’t know what to say — I find your question intrusive.”
Pace plays bisexual genius Joe McMillan in the AMC drama series Halt and Catch Fire, and will play closeted Republican Mormon Joe Pitt in the Broadway production of the two-part Tony Kushner gay fantasia Angels in America.
He says the 1991 play is more relevant now than ever.
“That’s more than reason to do this again now. Those dark politics of Roy Cohn; here we are with [Cohn’s protégé] Donald Trump as President—that’s the New York that Tony’s writing about in ’85,” Lee Pace told W. “Gosh, you read the press about Donald Trump then, that was written at the time. It’s the same city that I’m wandering around right now, the same place, but it’s 30 years on now.”
Pace also starred in a Broadway revival of The Normal Heart, a semi-autobiographic play by longtime HIV activist Larry Kramer about the government’s inaction during the earliest days of the HIV epidemic.
Back in 2014 Pace was accidentally outed as gay by fellow Hobbit co-star Ian McKellen, during an interview with a German publication.
