Lee Pace has a feature in the January issue of Interview magazine to promote The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. This is the final installment in Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth trilogy, and it enjoyed a fantastic debut this weekend. Pace shows no sign of slowing down his career after this film. He’s got a guest appearance coming up on The Mindy Project and the second season of Halt and Catch Fire will soon begin on AMC.

This interview doesn’t contain any huge revelations, but it’s just nice to check in with Lee Pace. He’s magical, charismatic, and a lovely, unassuming Texan boy. He spoke with Jim Parsons for this feature. These two have quite a history together. They got to know each other on the Warners Bros. lot (because Pushing Daisies shot on the stage next to Big Bang Theory) and became good friends after appearing in The Normal Heart on Broadway. Here are some excerpts:

He loves spending time on his parents’ farm: “It’s always lots of kids, lots of dogs. Well, there’s no hay or cows, but my dad is always working on projects for me to do. He’s got lots for me to carry to and from. He usually has some equipment that he either needs me to watch him operate or he needs me to boss around, whether it’s a new tractor, sawmill.”

On leaving The Hobbit: “It’s going to be very sad that it comes to an end this year when we show this final piece. I think it’s bittersweet. It’s this incredible group of people and we’ve come up with something that we’re all very proud of. And it’s the end of a long, long journey. Peter Jackson has achieved something very impressive, and I’m so grateful to be a part of it.

He knows his place as an actor: “We’re actors, we depend on being cast. It’s one of the things I love about my job: it’s my job to help a director tell the story, to just be willing to help. What do I need to do for you to make your story more clear? [The best director] is an incredibly creative person like Peter Jackson or Steven Spielberg or George C. Wolfe, who did Normal Heart. He had such a clear understanding of the space of the world these people were facing was. He collected this very diverse group of actors and we were all a part of that one unit.”

He went to senior prom every year: “I have never mentioned that before. I don’t know how people know that. I did. It’s true. I got asked. There was this senior girl who asked me my freshman year. Then second year I went with the girl I was seeing. I’m trying to remember how I ended up going my third year. I feel like we crashed that year. I had been twice before.”

On social media: “I can’t believe Instagram. People love it. Once or twice a week I’ll pick it up and look at it.”

On Halt & Catch Fire: “It’s about this American identity of the hunger for success and ambition and failure. We live in this culture where everyone’s just trying to get it right all the time: You’re trying to get right with God, you’re trying to be the right person, you’re trying to do this right, that right. And no one ever will. I really applaud the writers for writing these characters who are in the thick of trying to weed through the competition of their ambition versus their heart and their fallibility and their inadequacies and mediocrity and their desire to be more than they are. It’s the greys on this show that I find most interesting. You find yourself trying to categorize things–it’s this; it’s that–but it’s not that. It’s a grey thing that we all live through with the passage of time and our faulty record of memory. The show is about innovation, the march into the future. It’s impossible to think about that without really weighing the lasting impact of the past and the complicated conditions of the present.”

[From Interview]

I’m not surprised to learn that Lee was a big hit with the girls in high school. He was probably one of those tall, rangey types who was popular with older girls. He went to the senior prom as a freshman! I can’t even imagine going to a prom every year. One was more than enough over here. Proms are so overrated, but Lee Pace would make a prom worth it. The dude was a prom institution at his school.

Here’s what Lee wore last week to visit Jimmy Kimmel. So dashing! Lee talked about how his parents were extras in this Hobbit movie, and you can see that Kimmel clip here.

Photos courtesy of Interview, Fame/Flynet & WENN