While most people slowed down during the pandemic, Jake Lacy's schedule accelerated. It began with filming āThe White Lotusā for HBO, where his portrayal of an entitled newlywed dissatisfied with his honeymoon hotel room earned Lacy his first Emmy nomination.
āSince āWhite Lotus,ā I feel like I havenāt stopped moving. If Iām home between now and New Yearās, thatāll be the longest weāve been in one place in two plus years,ā said Lacy, 38, over Zoom from his home in Connecticut that he shares with his wife and two sons.
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But he's also quick to note his good fortune because āMy love for this work fires every one of my cylinders. When itās good, itās good. There's just nothing better for me (besides) my family and this work. Maybe reading books. Thatās it.ā
Lacy has been recognizable for more than a decade, popping up, for instance, on the final season of āThe Office" as Pete, a new salesman at Dunder Mifflin, or as a suitor for Rooney Mara in āCarol." There was also a recurring role as Lena Dunham's good-guy boyfriend, Fran, in HBO's āGirls.ā
Although he was āworking consistently,ā Lacy said doubt about that next job would creep in. "I felt like, āI 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.ā
When āWhite Lotusā began production, Lacy said the set was energized by having cameras roll again.
āI 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, āGet me out there, letās do this,ā you know? Murray Bartlett remembers the first scene he and I had when Iām coming to complain about the room. He was like, āI remember we both came at each other like two wild dogs.ā (Creator) Mike White had to go like, āAll right. This is the first time, let's pull it back a little bit,' Lacy laughed.
His latest role, in the new Peacock limited series ā A Friend of the Family," is more sinister. He portrays a man who ingrains himself into a church-going family in the 1970s, only to abduct one of the daughters twice.
āA Friend of the Family" drops its first four episodes Thursday with the remaining five doled out weekly. Lacy plays Robert Berchtold or āBā who meets the Broberg family and immediately zeros in on one of the young daughters, Jan. āBā manipulates the Brobergs in a multitude of ways to gain access to Jan. The series is based on true events with the real Jan Broberg and her mother, Mary Ann, signed on as producers. (A documentary about the case, ā Abducted in Plain Sight,ā began streaming on Netflix in 2019.)
When he took the job, Lacy wanted to make sure the children who worked on the series would be regarded with care.
āRight from the jump, I asked (showrunner) Nick (Antosca), āHow are you handling the abuse?ā He was like, āWe donāt. We donāt show it.ā Narratively, I have no interest in it. As a producer, I donāt want to create that kind of television."
As the person portraying the abuser, Lacy said he wanted to make sure both the kids and their parents felt safe because āthe worst thing would be to try to tell a story about grooming and trauma and in the process, traumatize a kid. His concerns were lessened by production who he credits with checking āevery box you could ask for.ā
āThe production went out of their way to do that as well, both having a therapist on set always by union regulations, and then also changing the sides and scripts that were given to the kids, to protect them from what the experience was.ā
The series also stars Lio Tipton, as Berchtold's long-suffering wife, and Colin Hanks and Anna Paquin as Jan's parents who each experience their own entanglements with the man. On screen they were adversaries, but Hanks says working with Lacy sparked a new friendship.
āIāll be quite honest, we were cracking jokes nonstop all the way up until action and then immediately after cut," said Hanks. "I think that made the work that much easier. It became very evident that we were kind of cut from the same cloth and that we needed to be able to think about everything else, anything else, and then we can go and do all the dark stuff that we have to do. We had an absolute blast. Heās an incredibly talented individual, and Iām really, really proud of the work that we did together.ā
Also this month, Lacy co-stars in the genre-blending film ā Significant Other," premiering Friday on Paramount+. Lacy and Maika Monroe play a young couple on a camping trip in Oregon.
āIt'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, 'Theyāre camping and a thing happens,ā he laughed. "But when the switch flips, it was a lot of fun to do.ā
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This story has been corrected to show that Mike White is the creator of "The White Lotus.''