AMC said goodbye to Breaking Bad last year, and they're already prepping next year's Mad Men swan song. With the loss of the two series that put them on the map for award-winning original programming, it's time for a new series and a new star to shake things up on the network. Enter Halt and Catch Fire and its leading man Lee Pace, who's not letting the media pressure get to him.



"I'm a huge fan of Mad Men," Pace told Yahoo TV as we sat down with him to talk about his new '80s-set drama about the dawn of personal computers. "I think that Jon Hamm and Matthew Weiner… it's such an achievement that they made that show. It's a very special fictional creation. But it's nothing like this. Nothing."



And while Pace gave props to his personal TV favorites like Breaking Bad and Netflix's House of Cards, he didn't take this new gig just to follow anti-hero suit: "Joe's a character that I've never seen before on television," he said, referring to Joe MacMillan, his renegade former IBM exec character who sets out to beat the computer pioneers at their own game. MacMillan decides to reverse-engineer the IBM PC with help from his ragtag team, engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) and prodigy Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis).









View photos





"I think he despises everything they stand for and the IBM corporate culture… you hear these crazy stories, which are true, of people in black or blue suits, modest coat and tie, white shirt, certain kind of haircut. It was the picture of corporate. I think he sees that and says, 'That's f---ed. It can be better than that, it can be more than that, and it needs to be. It has to be.' That's why he picked people like Gordon and Cameron to go on this journey with him because he's not interested in doing it that way.



"I want there to be something inspiring about him. It's not about the money. It's never about the money. Money's not interesting. Ideas are interesting, culture is interesting, and that's what he's hoping to be part of.









[Related: 'Halt and Catch Fire' First Look: The Battle for Control (and CTRL) Begins]

"He's just risked everything to make this happen. This is the big moment of his life, this is the make-or-break, he's got it all on the line. He's taking this huge, huge risk, and he knows it will be transformative — he just doesn't know how. He has an idea for how he'd like it to be transformative, but life is life, and Joe is not one of the guys on TV that always succeeds. There are those guys on TV that've got the gun, they know 12 languages, they always get the girl. Joe's not that guy. Joe is a hustler."



And Pace is at a similar point in his career, returning to TV after a five-year hiatus, taking a chance on a third television series, while his film and theater career are stronger than ever. He's also treading into uncharted waters, creatively, considering his two previous shows, Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls, were both created by the same man, Bryan Fuller.



"He's so weird. He's so special. And a true creator," Pace said of Fuller, now running NBC's Hannibal, whom he calls a friend for life. "He's a creator of things that would never exist on the planet without the mind of Bryan Fuller. When I was doing these conversations launching Pushing Daisies, I had to explain what that show was about. [Laughs.] 'Well I can touch dead people back to life, but they can only live for a minute, and if I touched them a second time then they would die forever. Annnnd that's the show. Oh and I bring my childhood sweetheart back to life but I can never touch her again.' I mean… it sounds like a Bollywood movie. [Laughs.] But when I read it, I was a little bit like, 'This thing is nuts. I like it.' And Wonderfalls too — tchotchkes would talk to Jaye [played by Caroline Dhavernas] and kind of encourage her to do things that would have unexpectedly positive outcomes.' He's nuts."



But as different as Ned the Pushing Daisies piemaker; Aaron Tyler, the easygoing yet existential crisis-prone brother of Jaye in Wonderfalls; and Joe MacMillan are, Pace's excitement to dive into a new character was the same: "I read it and I was like, 'Yeah, that guy's a psycho. Let's go! Let's do it!'"



Since Daisies went off the air in 2009, Pace has been spending his time doing theater in New York and acting on the big screen, starring in big budget Hollywood movies, a large number of them with a sci-fi bent. From playing a vampire in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 to his turn as Elven king Thranduil in The Hobbit, and tackling true villain territory as Ronan the Accuser in this summer's superhero blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy, coming back to TV isn't the only change for him: "I know, I'm finally playing a human again!"



Pace is admittedly the kind of actor who works best when he can find some common ground with the characters he's playing, but he's not so serious about his process that he can't make a joke. "I mean, I've got a little bit of Ned in me — I'm awkward. You play a character that long and it draws something out in you — but after doing Guardians of the Galaxy I'm now much more evil than I ever thought I would be. Super, super evil. [Laughs.]



"Joe is a character that I've got enough ideas about — I feel like I've met that guy before, or versions of that guy with different faces. I've never met a Ronan before. [Laughs.] And I've never met an Elven king before."























