ComingSoon spoke with Bodies Bodies Bodies star Lee Pace about his role as Greg in the black comedy slasher film and what franchises Pace still wants to take part in. Bodies Bodies Bodies will release theatrically on August 5.
“When a group of rich 20-somethings plans a hurricane party at a remote family mansion, a party game goes awry in this fresh and funny look at backstabbing, fake friends, and one party gone very, very wrong,” reads the film’s official synopsis.
Jonathan Sim: In Bodies Bodies Bodies, you play Greg. Tell me about this character and how you went about translating him from the page to the screen.
Lee Pace: I play Greg who is the new boyfriend of one of the friend group named Alice. He’s someone that she recently met on Tinder and, basically, they’re just in the second week of their romance. He accepted an invitation to come down to this crazy house party with a bunch of kids about 15 years younger than him. He’s just kind of an easygoing guy who wants to have a good time and has no expectations of what this weekend is going to hold. He just wants to have fun and kind of meet this group of gen Z-ers on their page and have a carefree weekend with them.
I think it’s so fascinating, the places that your character ends up going. What was the process of working with all these talented actresses and building a good onset dynamic between them all like?
I’m in an interesting position with Greg of being a character who doesn’t necessarily understand all of the codes that they share, and understanding all of the games … their customs and stuff. So I think a lot of what they do takes him by surprise. Some of it he’s like, “oh, fun, cool. What a fun experience.” And I think some of it’s troubling to him and definitely makes him want to take a step back and remember who he is in relationship to it. And that’s interesting, those moments to me. Like in the game when they’re all hitting each other, and Greg is a little bit like, “I don’t know if I like this. I don’t think this is very nice.” In the game when there’s tension between him and David, I think there’s a real sense of “why are you making it weird? It doesn’t need to be weird. Why are you trying to make a problem with me? I’m not going to get into a fight with you. You’re a kid,” you know? What’s the point? So that was a way of thinking about the character that I found really interesting, is that he’s someone who is not going to get hooked by the chaos. He’s going to try to deescalate, which doesn’t survive for long inside this world.
This is a character that you got to have a lot of fun playing. Is there a scene or a moment in this film that stands out as your favorite scene to film?
One of my favorite scenes to film was … I really liked that scene in the game where they come in, they find me dead, and they start trying to solve the Bodies Bodies Bodies game to see who had killed me. It just kind of deescalates into this bizarre tension between him and David that he doesn’t want to engage in. And it signals to him that this night is going sour and it’s probably best just to go to bed and avoid it. I found an interesting reality to that scene. I really enjoyed that scene. I also really enjoyed the scene where they find me in the gym and I think they’re still playing the game. It takes me quite a while to trust the fact that they’re not playing the game. They’re not just with me that they’re actually really afraid and that fear is making them deadly, and I need to take it seriously and defend myself. Even to the last, I feel like his instinct is to deescalate and make sure no one gets hurt.
You’ve worked in a lot of big movie franchises before, like Twilight, the Hobbit, and Marvel. Are there any other movie franchises that you would be interested in joining?
Oh, I’m game for anything. If the character’s cool, I’m down. My strategy is pretty simple. I want to play characters that I connect with, that I find something inspiring or interesting, whatever it is. I like playing bad guys. I like playing complicated characters, but if I read something on the page that I feel like, “oh yeah, I’m excited about this. I can do something with this.” Then I pursue to play the character. If there’s a director involved that I particularly want to work with, then that’s always something that I want to pursue. So that’s really where it starts for me.
