Lee Pace Says His 'Foundation' Nude Scene Was 'Not a Big Deal'
Season 2 of Foundation, the ambitious AppleTV+ adaptation of Isaac Asimov's epic science fiction saga, kicked off in style on Friday with a naked, sweaty sex scene-turned-fight scene featuring galactic clone emperor Cleon, a.k.a. Brother Day, played by Lee Pace.
The fast-paced sequence opens with Cleon in bed with his loyal robot aide Eto (Laura Birn), before they are set upon by assassins, and the emperor must fight for his life while completely nude. And as Pace revealed in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, he was "pretty naked" for the entire shoot.
"You know, I don't mind being [naked]," he said. "It's a crowded set of people, so I'm not gonna be obnoxious about it. But also, I'm not gonna go through a whole thing of slipping on shorts between every take."
He added that he was not fully nude, implying that he wore a modesty garment while filming the physically demanding scene: "I was definitely wearing something, but it's not a big deal. It's just a body. That's my feeling about it."
Ultimately, Pace believes that the naked fight scene was a useful piece of visual storytelling which clues the audience in a little as to exactly who Brother Day is as a character.
"It's like this little absurd prelude, [a] mini-story that encapsulates what Cleon is about," he explained. "There's a violence to it, for sure. It also has this heightened aesthetic... I think integral to what this Cleon is about is that he's a fighter. He likes to be hit and he likes to hit people. It was nice to be able to rehearse the moments where he's feeling confident and enjoying the fight so much. Then he gets hurt and he's afraid for his life, but he's still got good fight in him. Then he has this unreasonable moment of, 'You can't touch me. I'm the baddest one.' And in that moment of hubris, the knife cuts his chest. So we tried to form a little mini narrative inside of it. It was like being in a play. We did that fight front to back many times just so we felt as though we understood it before we filmed it."
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