It’s nice to see the Golden Globe Awards recognize Pushing Daisies, along with its two stars, for their work this season.

While we’d love to have seen Chi McBride and Kristin Chenoweth also honored, it’s hard to complain about the following nominations:

MUSICAL OR COMEDY
“30 Rock”
“Californication”
“Entourage”
“Extras”
“Pushing Daisies”

ACTOR (MUSICAL OR COMEDY)
Alec Baldwin - “30 Rock”
Steve Carell - “The Office”
David Duchovny — “Californication”
Ricky Gervais - “The Office”
Lee Pace - “Pushing Daisies”

ACTRESS (MUSICAL OR COMEDY)
Christina Applegate
America Ferrara
Tina Fey
Anna Friel
Mary Louise Parker

Here are highlights from an interview Lee Pace and Anna Friel gave USA Today about their characters on Pushing Daisies:

Q: From your banter, you seem to get along great. Could you engage in this romantic pairing if you didn’t?
Pace: I don’t know if you could get the specific thing that Chuck and Ned have if you didn’t like each other as much as we do.
Friel: I’d be surprised. I’ve seen really great love stories and then heard through the grapevine that they actually despised each other. I don’t think I could do that, if you’re working 16-17 hours a day, five days a week. … I see more of Lee than I do my daughter (2-year-old Gracie), my partner (actor David Thewlis) and my family.

Q: What do you think of the central conceit — one touch, life; second touch, death?
Pace: It’s sensible for Chuck to move as far away from Ned as possible. They shouldn’t be in the same room together. But they can’t live without each other.

Q: To avoid contact, pie-maker Ned and Chuck have touched through beekeeper suits, plastic casings, rubber gloves and kitchen wrap. How does it feel to kiss through plastic?
Friel: It’s so hot. I highly recommend it. One of the most sexual experiences of my life (she says, laughing). The same with the plastic sacks in the car. That was thicker. Each time we do it, the plastic is getting thinner and thinner. We started with industrial strength and now it’s going to super fine.

To read the full interview, click here.

Pushing Daisies star Lee Pace was recently featured in Bend Weekly, an Oregon newspaper.

It sounds like he enjoys working on the show almost as much as we enjoy watching it.

“It’s fantastic - this show is the most exciting thing in my life and I love shooting here,” the actor said. “I love being on a set 17 hours a day.”

Overall, Pace always knew he wanted to star on the big and small screen.

“To be honest, acting was the only thing I really knew how to do when it came down to making a living doing something,” he said. “A high school student in Houston at 17, Juilliard was the only drama school I auditioned for. It was foolish thinking.

But it’s obviously worked out well.

“I was an arrogant little (jerk) - I just knew I would get in - and luckily I got in,” Pace said of his experience with the prestigious university. “Of course, the one thing about Juilliard is that they take the arrogance right out of you. They let you know how you’ll be a much better actor if you think less about yourself and more about the work at hand. I’m not arrogant anymore.”

Chuck and Ned can’t touch lips, despite a couple efforts with beekeeper suits on and saran wrap protecting themselves.

But the same can’t be said of Anna Friel and Lee Pace.

During a recent Pushing Daisies fan event, these two actors laid a nice smooch on one another. Check it out and prepare to swoon…

Here’s an inside look at Lee Pace, along with other aspects of the series, courtesy of The Associated Press:

Relaxing on the set of Pushing Daisies, Lee Pace taps the air teasingly with his forefinger. It’s how Pace’s character, Ned, makes others live or die with a single stroke on the darkly whimsical ABC drama.

It’s also how Pace keeps British actress Anna Friel, his lively co-star, in line during long production hours. Friel plays Ned’s longtime love, Charlotte “Chuck” Charles.

“When Anna acts up on set, I just touch her like this,” Pace said, pointing a magic finger.

The finger-tap is a joke on Ned and Chuck’s deadly dilemma. In the show’s pilot, Ned resurrected Chuck after she was murdered. Now they live together. If Ned touches Chuck once more — directly, skin-on-skin — she’s back in a casket, pronto.

“Just sitting together in a car, it’s life or death stakes for them,” Pace said of the seemingly doomed (or at least physically frustrated) couple. “Every day when we block scenes, I think, `Now how should we hold our bodies?’”

In fact, the physical intimacy of Ned and Chuck is carefully chaperoned on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, especially by executive producer Barry Sonnenfeld, who also directs the series.

“Barry’s always going, `Ooops! Don’t you dare touch Anna,’” Friel said. “It’s hard, trying to fit together into a tight two-shot.”

But, is the show trying to be political?

If Pushing Daisies carries a message about sexual abstinence, “that was never the intention, but you can certainly read it in,” creator Bryan Fuller said. “I suppose the show is really about the dangers of any kind of intimacy, not just physical intimacy.

Pace agrees, saying the series is far deeper than anything sexual.

“Ned’s real gift is the understanding of the value of life and death,” the actor said. “He’s not careless with his powers. But after he brought Chuck back to life everything is different for him. It’s like his life is happening for the first time.”

Continue reading this article …

Lee Pace is featured in a recent Miami Herald article.

The piece begins by focusing on the spiritual journey undertaken a couple years ago by the Pushing Daisies star. He checked into a meditation retreat after he returned from filming The Good Shepherd in London.

How come?

“… probably to detox for the amount I drank while I was in London,” the actor joked. “One of the things that they work on with you there, is that you can let go of anything. You just let it go. You sit there for hours during the day just meditating and being quiet. Your back hurts, you get tired and hungry and the whole point of the practice is you just let it go…

You can really bring that into life. You can let anything go, bad feelings about things, attachment to things that aren’t useful to your life. You can just let it go.”

Many actors are so absorbed in the parts they are playing that they never correlate the roles with their lives. Pace is not one of those. In fact, his role as the magical Ned in ABC’s whimsical Pushing Daisies has accelerated his interest in the meaning behind the words.

Ned can miraculously bring people back to life by the mere touch of his finger.

“I do think I’ve been away from spirituality since I left home at 17,” Pace said. “So now I think I’m coming back to it in a way I hadn’t before. I’d forgotten it’s an important thing to give thought to your morality and how you intend to live your life.”

Click here to read the full article.

On the verge of becoming a household name due to the success of Pushing Daisies, Lee Pace reflected on the show with TeenTelevision.com.

Here are excerpts from that interview:

TeenTelevision: If you really had this power, who would you touch to bring back?
Lee: Wow. My grandmother because I loved her very much.

TeenTelevision: What about the show really intrigues you?
Lee: I’m really excited about the procedural [detective] elements to the show. It wasn’t the thing that initially attracted me to it. I thought the love story would be really fun. But, with the minds that work on this show, I think that procedural element is going to be really awesome. The episodes that I’ve read so far, every one takes you into this really cool, kind of bizarre, splashy world.

They are all totally different, all exciting. There’s a neat adventure to it. The first episode is about Ned getting excited about the adventure, getting out of The Pie Hole [where he works], excited about breaking free and starting to live his life.

TeenTelevision: You were born in Texas and lived as a child in the Middle East so how did you get into acting?
Lee: I got to a point where it was the only thing I knew how to do and I was in high school [in Texas] and I auditioned for Julliard and got in. I did a couple of monologues and had a meeting with them. I don’t know how they picked me. They said, ‘you now have to go back to high school and get your diploma’ so I did.

Lee Pace isn’t exactly complaining that Pushing Daisies is receiving such critical praise. But there is one drawback to such acclaim: pressure.

“If I’m feeling good, I’m very grateful for that,” the actor recently said in an interview with Zap2it. “Some days, though, it makes me nervous, like, ‘Oh, God, I hope we don’t mess it up.’”

We doubt they will. Meanwhile, the actor took readers inside the character of Ned a bit.

“From the beginning moments of the pilot, (Ned has) created a place that he understands,” Pace said. “He can give people fresh pie and goodness and be a generous person within a small world.

“Then he brings Chuck back to life, and his entire world is blown open. He learns something new, I think, in every episode about how to enjoy his life, how to make other people’s lives a better place. That’s the big psychology, I think, behind his gift, in that … it’s a tricky one, one that comes with a consequence and a dilemma.”

Speaking of Chuck - or Anna Friel, the actress that portrays her - how does this British star feel about really making a splash in the United States?

“I was a little bit frightened because I never had done quite this style of acting before, where it’s a little bit and there’s a lot of comedy involved,” she said. “But I thought, ‘I’m going to choose the thing that scares and challenges me the most.’ I loved the whole fairy-tale essence of it all, and I thought it was the most exciting script I had seen in a very long time.

“Chuck is just a wonderful character. I mean, she makes honey for the homeless and she’s been raised by these two extremely mad aunts and learned several languages and read thousands and thousands of books. That’s a great start for a character.”

The following interview with Lee Pace is taken from the same E! Online feature that named the actor as a Newbie We’ll Love…

How did you get involved with Pushing Daisies?
I’ve been doing movies for the past five years, and I wasn’t really looking at doing television until this year, but I did work with Bryan Fuller on Wonderfalls, and I heard through the grapevine that Bryan Fuller had a new show, so I got a script from the manager. I read it, and I thought, this is actually really, really good.

Then I talked to Bryan, and he told me, “You know, I kind of wrote the character with you in mind.” And I was like, Oh, wow, that’s never happened before.

That’s so amazing.
Ned reads like the way I speak; we have the same speech patterns. So, I called my agents and my manager and I said, “I think this is really worth doing.”

So, they fought you, or you fought them, or both?
Both. I remember one of them saying, “Doing television right now would be a deeply regrettable move.” I just kept thinking, You know, if I’m tied up not doing movies for six years that means the show is a massive hit. And if that’s the problem I’m dealing with six years from now, then I’ll take it. I’ll take it. But what really kind of tipped the scale is that it’s good. Barry Sonnenfeld is directing it!

And the cast is great.
Every element has fallen into place. Everyone on the cast and crew gets along really, really well, we enjoy working together.

This show is love!
It’s about love and life. It’s about someone who can bring people back to life, but who can also inadvertently kill people. What I think we’re going to see Ned gain through the course of the series is an appreciation for how good it is to be alive. That’s the addition that Chuck makes to his life - it’s good to be alive, it’s good to be out of the Pie Hole, solving these cases. He learns how good life can be, how important this gift is.

America will love Lee Pace.

So says a feature on E! Online, as the entertainment site counts down fresh faces on fall TV for the country to get excited about.

Here’s what it says about the Pushing Daisies star:

Who He Is: The star of ABC’s critically acclaimed dramedy Pushing Daisies, Lee Pace is best known so far for his work as Jaye’s big brother on Wonderfalls, an earlier show from Daisies creator Bryan Fuller, and for his turn in the Showtime film Soldier’s Girl.

Where to Meet Him: On Pushing Daisies, of course, the story of Ned, a gentle pie baker who just so happens to be able to resurrect the dead. Unfortunately, his power comes with strings attached, and as a consequence, he is forever forbidden to touch the love of his life: a girl named Chuck (Anna Friel).

She was dead once, you see, and he brought her back to life by his magic touch, and should he ever touch her a second time, she would die forever, never to return. Ah, the road of TV love never did run smooth.

Why You’ll Love Him: He’s smart, sweet and thoughtful, not to mention dead sexy.