CarterMatt Awards 2016: Lee Pace of ‘Halt and Catch Fire’ takes home Top Actor prize
For the past few weeks, we’ve had people from all over the world take part in voting for the annual CarterMatt Awards, and we’re happy to now present one of the latest results for Top Actor, a category that has notoriously been very crowded and competitive over the past 5 years we have been running our awards.
Yet, this time around, we actually had a fairly decisive victory in the end, as Lee Pace of “Halt and Catch Fire” ended up being the winner of the reader vote.
Pace received a whopping 57% of the vote, and what is especially notable about him getting the award here is that it marks the first time this year we’ve had a repeat winner! This victory was by a larger margin than last year, and we think a big part of that may be especially some of the great work we saw during season 3 of “Halt and Catch Fire” — especially in the penultimate episode of the season entitled “NIM.” This was a very scaled-back hour given that almost the entirety of it was focused on Joe MacMillan and Cameron Howe at COMDEX, and it painted such a glorious portrait of who they were as people at that specific time of their lives, and how they were still searching for some degree of achievement that they’d been unable to find elsewhere. In some ways, this episode was the foundation that set in motion the finale, where we started to construct an internet-based storyline that could extent into season 4.
What makes the work of Pace so spectacular often comes via his restraint. He’s a performer who lives within the moment, and has no problem making many of Joe’s most-powerful scenes poignant within their subtlety. There is a quality to him that is similar to Jon Hamm in “Mad Men,” who could generate a strong reaction with just a single word of dialogue. Joe, like Don Draper, is an incredibly flawed person; yet, you can see the good in him, and you want to root for that even though you are aware there is no guarantee that the good will win out in the end.
Congratulations to all fans of Lee Pace on the win! Also, congratulations for the season 4 renewal! “Halt and Catch Fire” should return with its final episodes at some point in 2017. If we get another fantastic performance from Pace in it, there’s a reasonably good chance we could see him up for the Top Actor award again next year. Can he make the three-peat happen? We shall see!