Pushing Daisies

Here are a couple of interviews featuring Lee Pace and Kristin Chenoweth for the Houston Chronicle.

Lee talked about his childhood…

• Pace had a somewhat rootless childhood. He was born in Oklahoma and spent part of his youth in the Middle East, before the family settled in Spring. He’s not sure if that informs Ned’s awkwardness around people in any way. To wit: “I bet it does. Or maybe not,” he says. He laughs. “I don’t know . . . I’m not as self-reflective as many other actors are. So maybe. Probably.” Pace says he fell into acting. He’d wanted to be a swimmer but recurring ear infections kept him out of the water. He needed another high school elective, which is when his mother suggested acting. “I thought she was kidding.” He says “in Texas they can make anything competitive,” so he found himself in speech tournaments that included actors and debaters interacting.

  Pace did some work at the Alley Theatre before studying acting further at Juilliard. He suggests that time between high school and drama school was particularly important. “It gave me some perspective,” he says. “You hear people in drama school ask things like, ‘When I get out do I want to work in theater, TV or film?’ When you get out you don’t have time to ask that. You have to hustle.”

Kristin dished on her upcoming autobiography…

• Chenoweth, whose on-again, off-again romance with West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin was mined for material in Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip — in which the Christian character played by Sarah Paulson was not-so-loosely based on Chenoweth — has stories of her own to tell, and she’ll be doing just that next year in a book titled A Little Bit Wicked. “I had a ghost writer, I’m not going to pretend I wrote it by myself. I worked on it solid for three months,” Chenoweth said. “It’s about my adoption, but it is about my life. I didn’t want to call it a memoir, because I don’t think that fits yet,” she said, laughing.

  One thing it’s not about is the search for her birth parents. “It’s actually kind of the opposite, about what it’s like not to do that, and what it’s like not to have that family history, but to connect with the people who raised you,” Chenoweth said. At first, she was nervous about telling her family about the book, “because I didn’t want to hurt them. Because my mom’s always like, ‘You know, if you ever want to find your real parents . . . ‘ But they were thrilled. Because I wanted to kind of give other people inspiration.”