It’s been fifteen years since Bryan Fuller’s Pushing Daisies appeared on television, and yet when you watch the show now, it still feels fresh and unexpected—a testament to the work done by Fuller, his creative team, and an astoundingly perfect cast led by Lee Pace, Kristin Chenoweth, Anna Friel, and Chi McBride.
Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk recently spoke to Pace about his role as Ned the piemaker, noting, “Pushing Daisies is whimsical in a heady, almost flighty way, but its whimsy was also full of grief and longing. Looking back, it was a show with an unmistakably queer aesthetic, and yet that undercurrent went largely unspoken at the time.” Though that element may have gone largely unspoken, it didn’t go unnoticed by fans, or by Pace himself.
“Yeah. This show was queer. For sure,” Pace says in the video above. He continues, “I think it’s one of the things that the audience connected to ultimately and continues to connect to when they discover it. It exists in a space that it carves for itself; it doesn’t need the signals of other spaces. Any person can come to it and meet it where it is, if that makes any sense.”
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Pace says:
That invitation to a place that is truly queer that is just, “This is what we like, what do you like?” There’s no barrier to entry, no matter, how you’re coming to it. That’s Bryan Fuller’s self-reflection and reflecting on how he grew up, how he processed love growing up in the ’80s and ’90s and everything that was going on in our country during that time. That goes into the machine and Pushing Daisies comes out. That’s art.
Pushing Daisies was Pace’s second time on a Bryan Fuller show, after Wonderfalls, and there’s a great deal of warmth in how he talks about the show’s style, its writing, the way he and his fellow actors studied their lines, and the sense of community on the set. Speaking about his role as Ned, who can bring dead things back to life but can’t touch the love of his life, Chuck (Anna Friel), Pace says, “I guess I just related to his feeling like an outsider.” He describes Friel as the exuberant, life-loving one, and himself as more introverted, more “Ned-like”:
And I remember the impact Anna had on me, similar to Ned and Chuck. Ned is leading this very closed-off life, working away on his pies, doing this hustle that he’s got going with Emerson, and then she comes into his life, and I’ve always thought that that’s really the heart of the show. When you have love, when you have enjoyment, a love of life, that’s the thing that makes a show about death not really about death. That’s the best way I can answer your question: I was looking for love and Anna Friel came into my life in a way that Ned was looking for love when Chuck came.
The entire interview is candid and sweet and insightful, including the tidbit about how Peter Jackson cast Pace as Thanduil, the Elven king, because of seeing him in Pushing Daisies. “How he went from Ned to the Elven king is very bizarre, but I’ll take it,” Pace says.
We’ll all take it. We’ll take Pace in just about anything. Pushing Daisies is currently on HBO Max; if you need some warmth and whimsy and love and vivid life, please do yourself a favor and start watching.
