4 days ago
'He's Checked Out, Getting Stoned': Lee Pace on Playing 'Foundation's Most Unlikely Emperor
'I play a different character each season,' Pace said. 'But the riddle is that they're the same man, but they're different men. One of the challenges I like to set myself is to make them as different as possible from their brothers I had a really good time with this one. The other Cleons [I've played] are very serious about being the Emperor, executing people, and bossing around trillions of people, but this guy doesn't want to play.
'He's checked out, living in the garden getting stoned.'
As usual, Pace nails the execution. Whereas season two's Cleon 17 was built around an 'immense sense of ego', Cleon 24 was built to essentially be that character's antithesis, at odds with the actor's own pre-conceived ideas of how an emperor of the galaxy should be.
'What I landed on with last season's is that inside is a narcissistic belief that he's the hero of the story.'
In order to arrive at that place, Pace meditated on what power tends to do to an already narcissistic man and, having observed many such people in our collective culture, came to understand the blind spots and weaknesses inherent in that approach to life.
'In powerful men that I know and that I observe in culture, there is a sense of ego about them that is incredibly narcissistic and it's like a black hole of energy around them… they only seem to excel as long as they are sucking people into that void,' he explained. 'This season, I'm playing the antithesis of that. I'm playing someone who has no interest in that power. He's had power thrust on him, but he doesn't recognise it, he's just not interested.'
What that means for Empire, and Foundation, is anyone's guess at this point, but with the third season of Foundation entering its second half, we're bound to find out soon.
