The pandemic prompted most individuals to slow down, but Jake Lacy’s timetable picked up speed. His first nomination for an Emmy came when he starred in “The White Lotus” for HBO, where he played a spoiled newlywed who was unhappy with his hotel room during his honeymoon.
“Since ‘White Lotus,’ I feel like I haven’t stopped moving. If I’m home between now and New Year’s, that’ll be the longest we’ve been in one place in two plus years ,” said Lacy, 38, via Zoom from the Connecticut house he shares with his wife and two sons.
The fact that “My love for this work fires every one of my cylinders. When it’s good, it’s good. There’s just nothing better for me (besides) my family and this work. Maybe reading books. That’s it.”
For example, Lacy appeared on the final season of “The Office” as Pete, a new salesperson at Dunder Mifflin, or as a potential suitor for Rooney Mara in “Carol.” Lacy has been well-known for more than ten years. In HBO’s “Girls,” there was also a recurrent part as Fran, Lena Dunham’s good-guy lover.
Despite “working consistently,” Lacy admitted that he occasionally had second thoughts about getting the next job. would creep in. “I felt like, ’I don’t know how I’m going to have two kids and buy a house and do this, like it just might not happen’… then a job would come along and buoy me long enough to not feel that way anymore.”
Lacy said that having the cameras start rolling once more enlivened the set as “White Lotus” went into production.
“I think because of the pandemic, none of us had filmed in a year or eight months at best. There was a real enthusiasm and kind of gnawing excitement to be like, ‘Get me out there, let’s do this,’ you know? Murray Bartlett remembers the first scene he and I had when I’m coming to complain about the room. He was like, ‘I remember we both came at each other like two wild dogs.’ (Creator) Mike White had to go like, ‘All right. This is the first time, let’s pull it back a little bit,’ Lacy laughed.
His most recent performance is more menacing in the brand-new Peacock limited series “A Friend of the Family.” In the 1970s, he plays a man who becomes a part of a church-going family only to abduct one of the daughters twice.
The first four episodes of “A Friend of the Family” will air on Thursday, and the remaining five will air every week. When Lacy’s character Robert Berchtold, also known as “B,” meets the Broberg family, he quickly develops feelings for Jan, one of the young daughters. In order to get access to Jan, “B” uses a variety of tactics to trick the Brobergs. The real Jan Broberg and her mother, Mary Ann, have joined as producers for the show, which is based on historical events. (In 2019 Netflix started streaming the documentary “Abducted in Plain Sight,” which is about the case.)
Lacy wanted to ensure that the kids who worked on the series would be treated with respect when he accepted the job.
“Right from the jump, I asked (showrunner) Nick (Antosca), ‘How are you handling the abuse?’ He was like, ‘We don’t. We don’t show it.’ Narratively, I have no interest in it. As a producer, I don’t want to create that kind of television.”
Being the abuser in the story, Lacy said he wanted to make sure the children and their parents felt secure because “the worst thing would be to try to tell a story about grooming and trauma and in the process, traumatise a kid. His concerns were lessened by production who he credits with checking “every box you could ask for ,” allayed his concerns.
The production went out of its way to insulate the children from the experience, modifying the sides and scripts that were provided to them as well as keeping a therapist on set at all times per union requirements.
Lio Tipton plays Berchtold’s patient wife in the show, and Colin Hanks and Anna Paquin play Jan’s parents, who each have their own relationships with the character. In real life, they were rivals, but Hanks claims that working with Lacy helped them develop a new bond.
Lacy co-stars in the genre-bending movie “Significant Other” this month as well “debuting this Friday on Paramount+ Playing a young couple going camping in Oregon is Lacy and Maika Monroe.
“It’s a tough thing to talk about because the basis of the movie is a spoiler. You can only kind of offer up the first act and be like, ‘They’re camping and a thing happens,” he laughed. “But when the switch flips, it was a lot of fun to do.”