Lee Pace covered a recent issue of GQ Hype. He’s promoting Bodies Bodies Bodies, but also Apple TV’s Foundation, a show I have never watched. The second season has already been filmed and he talks about that a little bit in the GQ piece. Mostly, though, he’s just a peaceful vibe. He’s happily married, he built a house for himself in upstate New York, he’s close to his family, he enjoys fashion and he works when he wants to. Zen and the Art of Lee Pace, I’m telling you. Some highlights from this piece:

He bought land in 2010 with the idea of building his own house: “There’s something—a fundamental lesson about self sufficiency—inside this. I wanted to explore it. And I took this timber framing course up in Maine where I learned how to do the math to design it and carved the joints with a handsaw and chisels. Of all things that I’ve done I’m like, ‘Hey, I actually built this thing.’” When I ask how many acres he’s sitting on, he gets a glazed look in his eyes and says, “Oh it’s big, very big.” There are no fences, and currently no crops. Just grass and wild turkeys and bears and foxes.

His ease with masculinity: “Who doesn’t?” A lot of men, I say. “They’re just stuck in it. It’s awfully loud. It’s a loud force in our world. And I think that makes it very hypnotic. But I also think that it’s a very multifaceted thing. There’s lots of different ways to look at what that is. It’s not always the toxic thing that we have come to stamp it as.”

He loved working with Pete Davidson: “I loved working with Pete. I found him as a human being fascinating—his stories were interesting. His approach to the work was serious and interesting. I don’t watch Saturday Night Live, so I don’t know what he does on Saturday Night Live. But in that context, I was like, ‘You’re cool and I really am curious to see what things you do in your career.’”

His husband: Pace and his husband Matthew Foley, an executive at Thom Browne, were set up a few years ago by a mutual friend. “I said to my friend, Nick, ‘You know a lot of people, who do you have for me?’ And it luckily has worked out.’ What I’ll say about being married, it was once described to me as an endless sleepover with your weirdest friend. In our experience, that is absolutely true. If you’ve found one person you can be weird around, hold on tight.”

Whether he’s ready to be a father: “I’d love to have kids. I think there’s nothing better than little kids running around.”

On ‘Foundation’: “I play a different character every season, because there’s big time jumps. There’s just so many different layers of generations of men… What is interesting about this character is that it’s like this grotesque of a man who’s in control of everything–he’s Emperor of the Galaxy; no one can stop it–and the absurdity of that.”

He was raised Catholic, and he recently went into a church for the first time in years: “Sitting in this church, listening to these Czech services, I didn’t understand a word they were saying, so I didn’t hear sin or judgment or any of those things that bothered me so much when I heard them when I was younger. I found myself among all of these other people who had wandered in off the street to think about their lives, to think about how to be good people, to think about the challenges that they face. I’m not interested in dogma, but I am interested in understanding my life better.”

[From GQ Hype]

“They’re just stuck in it. It’s awfully loud. It’s a loud force in our world. And I think that makes it very hypnotic…” That’s an interesting way to describe the concept – and reality – of masculinity. That we, as a society, are stuck in it. That masculinity is loud and hypnotic. He’s right? Masculinity and the performance of masculinity drowns out a lot of sh-t. And marriage is “an endless sleepover with your weirdest friend”? That’s kind of nice too. He has a way with words. I feel very peaceful when I read his interviews.

Please look through the carousel, this photoshoot was SO GOOD!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by GQ (@gq)

Cover & IG courtesy of GQ.