Coffee joints in L.A. are famously overrun with idling "thesps," as Variety calls them, waiting for their Treos to warble while another perfect day evaporates.

Lee Pace has seen their faces. "That Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Sunset," the 28-year-old actor acknowledges, conjuring a particularly obnoxious franchise, "that's ground zero for Hollywood dreams and desperation."

Pace has just slipped off his tortoiseshell Wayfarers and tabled his iPhone at a Hollywood Starbucks, but he's not exactly waiting for his agent to call. The son of a globe-trotting Texas oilman, he stumbled into acting in high school in order to earn a few elective credits and has since put together a résumé that would cause the typical coffeehouse actor-aspirant to choke on his grande macchiato.

While still studying at New York's Juilliard School, Pace was cast in his first off-Broadway play, and he's been working steadily in theater, movies, and television ever since: in playwright Craig Lucas's Obie-winning Small Tragedy; alongside Matt Damon in Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd; costarring with Sarah Michelle Gellar in Possession. Meanwhile, his starring role as the amiable piemaker Ned on the sweetly subversive ABC comedy Pushing Daisies — a surprise hit from last season's prime-time schedule — has given Pace his first brush with airport-rubbernecking celebrity.

"I'm not totally comfortable with it," he admits.

Perhaps that's because he has spent much of his career disappearing into brutally challenging roles. He snagged a Golden Globe nomination (and lost 25 pounds) for his portrayal of a transsexual stripper in the Showtime movie Soldier's Girl; played Dick Hickock, one of the killers depicted in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (Douglas McGrath's Infamous); and spent three weeks in a wheelchair as a paralyzed Hollywood stuntman in this month's The Fall.

Hang-dog handsome, Pace is a throwback to the classic New York theater-trained actors of the seventies — the Pacinos, De Niros, Hackmans, Hoffmans, and the rest who defied conventional wisdom to become Hollywood leading men. "That was a time when movie stars were character actors," Pace says. Perhaps their moment has come again. It's not lost on him that this year's Academy Award for best actor went not to George Clooney but to Daniel Day-Lewis, who has made a career inhabiting challenging (and not always likable) personas.