Lee Pace Talks Growing Up as Part of the Queer Community

Lee Pace came out as a proud “member of the queer community” last year and now he’s opening up about growing up in that community.

The 40-year-old actor opened up while discussing his Broadway play Angels in America in Variety‘s The Big Ticket with Marc Malkin podcast.

Lee never experienced the danger that his character Joe Pitt did in the play.

“I’ve always felt very safe, you know? I was in the drama department in high school. I went to Julliard. I’ve been playing queer characters. My first movie I played a trans character,” Lee said. “I’ve never felt the danger of that, you know? So, to walk in the shoes of someone who that danger is so real that he can’t utter it, it taught me something about myself and about my community… We’re not all so lucky to get the free pass in life.”

“As a community, we can be very unkind to each other, I feel like. It’s very judgmental to kind of look at someone and [think] you oughta do it like this… there’s a more gentle way to be and I guess before I played Joe, I could look at that character on the page and think, ‘What a coward.’ After playing him, I don’t see a ‘coward.’ He had a journey. I see someone who did something that was very hard to do,” Lee added.