Like a precision Swiss watch, like Pavlov’s dog, like a tale as old as time, a new photo of Lee Pace is released, and reliably, the Internet gasps.
The 6’5” tall drink of water, a mainstay of the “Internet Boyfriend”/“Hot Guy Thirst” contingent of the extremely online, draws attention anytime he appears scantily clad in a photo, but that’s particularly been the case with Apple TV+’s Foundation. So when the image was first released of Pace—tan, long hair, shirtless, and wearing nothing but a very casually draped sarong—a new cycle of hyperventilating began.
Now that we’ve been relishing the twists and turns of Foundation’s third season, we can say that even in the context of a sweeping space opera about a galaxy falling apart in slow motion, this specific hot photo is also important.
The high-concept scifi series, loosely based on novels by Isaac Asimov, takes place across centuries and the vastness of space, fueled by characters who are putting their all into cheating death and averting a future pan-galactic destruction of humanity. It’s not light, frothy fare, but it is an awful lot of fun, thanks to its bold storytelling choices, rich visual texture, and the performances of an ensemble who commit fully to each episode’s twisty plot developments and intense character beats.
In a uniformly strong, riveting cast—over time, the ensemble of Pace, Laura Birn, Terrence Mann, and Cassian Bilton has developed into a formidable company of players—Pace stands out in every scene he’s in.
This isn’t a cheap goof about Pace’s prodigious height or a suggestion that he’s a scene-stealer, but a moment to honor the all too rare perfect union between an actor and his role.
The new images of Pace as the powerful Emperor known as Brother Day cut sharply against audience expectations built over Foundation’s first two seasons. This is a character who opened Season 2 by fending off a platoon of would-be assassins in his bedroom. It would have been a dramatic set piece no matter what, but the danger and titillation get turned way up thanks to Pace performing the knock-down, drag-out brawl in the nude.
No, this image of Pace in character stuns because rather than the sculpturally muscular Brother Day of Season Two we see a…hot schlub?
Look at him! The Jesus hair and beard, the lack of belly button (a visual reminder that his character is a clone literally grown in an imperial lab), the aggressively manscaped and touchingly dad bod torso. Each element contributes to the overall impression that somehow The Dude from The Big Lebowski’s influence reaches across storytelling universes, but it’s Pace’s posture that really tells us what this new model Brother Day is all about.
The angle at which he’s leaning backward while walking forward threatens us with a good time and suggests the laws of physics might be optional for the absolute, if reluctant, monarch. It’s a tiny detail, but in an interview with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, Pace noted the importance of deliberately changing his body from the ultra-fit, “lean and mean” version of Day we see in Season 2 to the “big and relaxed” one on an earnest journey of self-discovery in Season 3.
We find the current model of Brother Day 300 years into what amounts to a massive continuity experiment, a man Pace describes as “very conscious of the trap he’s in. He’s very, very kind, and wholly disillusioned with the idea that he is the emperor of the galaxy.” His entire life of absolute power and luxury, built on a foundation of violence, is so revolting that “he wants to opt out and go hang out in the garden, get stoned, play with his ferret, and drink and be relaxed.” To achieve the look that projects Day’s defiantly lazy, louche approach to life, Pace specifically did not hit the gym. Rather, “I didn’t really watch what I ate, and I ate what I wanted and just kind of enjoyed” turning his severe-looking character into a guy whose behavior and physicality project genial dissipation.
Pace’s relentlessness in going the extra mile at every opportunity lets him deliver a performance that’s utterly sincere and uproariously funny by turns. Season over season, his performance is something unexpected: peerless and invested, and fueled by camp. In her essential 1964 essay “Notes on Camp”, Susan Sontag described camp variously as “exaggerated he-man-ness”, “a tender feeling”, and “a mode of enjoyment and appreciation”. The exuberance and occasional excess of Pace’s performance are both inescapable, but even when his Cleon is way over the top, Pace’s acting choices are rooted in earnestness, not mockery.
Purposefully or not, his approaches to the various iterations of Brother Day hew to Christopher Isherwood’s definition of high camp, which “always has an underlying seriousness. You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it, you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.”
Pace’s incorporation of camp into his performance, particularly the immunity to cringe that it requires, holds the key to understanding how well cast he is. Every scene feels as though when faced with assigning priorities to each facet—from the casting and costumes to its set design and themes—Foundation’s creators decided to rank all of them first in importance.
Hundreds of years before the series begins, Emperor Cleon I took the idea of a familial dynasty like the Tudors or Romanovs and went even further by cloning himself at three different ages. He re-created his most youthful self, his fully fledged adult self, and his elder statesman self, establishing a ruling triumvirate of brothers, called Brother Dawn, Brother Day, and Brother Dusk.
There are always three of them, with backups constantly, quietly growing in special gestational tanks in the palace, so that if one of the three living Cleons dies off-schedule, his replacement can emerge ready to step into his predecessor’s shoes right away. All of this is overseen by Lady Demerzel, secretly a 25,000 year-old robot who has always been the Cleons’ caregiver and fixer, the true power behind the thrones.
The Cleons—both collectively and individually also referred to as Empire—are trapped in an eternal paradox where they are simultaneously the most important people in the galaxy, and are aware that the life of any one of them is cheap.
Cassian Bilton, who plays Brother Dawn, called out this mind-bender, noting that “their bodies are this strange vessel for the consciousness of a man” long since dead. Unbeknownst to Empire, Lady Demerzel has been grappling with an existential crisis of her own that’s a photo negative of Day’s struggles. Laura Birn, who plays Demerzel, explains that the weight of “the decisions she’s had to make, and having seen the effects that they have on many people…they stay with her, they burden her.” Her programming forces her to remember everything she’s done and to protect the Cleons at all costs “stay with her and burden her.”
(That’s only one piece of what’s going on in Foundation’s universe; the titular Foundation is another faction of people sent into Empire-authorized exile, using extremely complex math and stasis tanks to manipulate future events. It’s fascinating, but we can’t be here for 5000 words, so don’t even worry about it. )
This show goes hard at all times, taking itself seriously while providing many moments of high silliness (complimentary), and requiring a very particular kind of leading man for their main character. In Season 2, Brother Day’s prospective bride and her vast retinue arrive at the imperial court in a procession of large-scale, billowing multicolored silks that strongly evoke the opening of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.
In Season 1, he subjects himself to a grueling, dangerous religious pilgrimage across a rocky desert just to prove his own dubious humanity to a powerful religious order sincerely devoted to the ritual. In Season 3, he becomes a devotee of inhaling the hallucinogenic spores of a rare plant and given to shuffling around the palace in The Dude drag.
To pull off so many big moments and dizzying shifts in tone and behavior for Brother Day, Foundation needed Lee Pace, because is the king of over the top, yet totally believable commitment as a performer. If you’ve ever wondered what Jeremy Strong’s work might look like if he had a sense of humor about it, look no further than Lee Pace. He’s got a twinkle in his eye, yet he never winks at the audience. Foundation’s writers know they can turn up the intensity with confidence that he’ll deliver every time.
For his part, Pace knows he has to bring his A+ game to perform toe-to-toe with Birn, Bilton, and Mann. Bilton’s approach to playing Dawn includes drawing on the look of Roman emperors and the brutalist aesthetic and autocracy of the Soviet era’s power structure. Broadway veteran Mann turned to Shakespeare to get at “the big feelings, big events, high stakes” of primarily the Plantagenet and Tudor kings of the historical plays, though “in the third season, [Brother Dusk] is a combination of Richard III and King Lear.”
In Season 3, Brother Day does the near-unthinkable, escaping the stifling cage of luxury that his palace’s complex has become, and slipping out of Lady Demerzel’s control. It’s fitting that the emotionally stunted Day’s big “you’re not the boss of me!” adventure begins as a teen quest—in interstellar ravewear, no less!—to find and renew his relationship with the kind and beautiful concubine Song, yet has the potential to become something far more philosophical.
In a series obsessed with the degradation and corruption of noble visions and grand plans, the simplicity of Brother Day’s desire to just be a regular guy is kind of sweet. Self-centered? Sure, but that’s baked into his DNA and bolstered by a lifetime of being cosseted in Foundation’s version of Versailles, regardless of what little interest he has in embracing a “l’état, c’est moi” role. Maybe it’s even a little bit gutsy. However uncertain Day’s fate, I’ll hit play the second this season finale drops, just to see how Pace plays it.
