Jake Lacy Won’t Flip A Table — But He’d Like You To Think He Could

Jake Lacy has long been at the center of major pop culture moments: He played easygoing customer sales rep Pete Miller on The Office, Hannah’s boyfriend Fran on Girls and, later, the aggrieved bro Shane in Season 1 of The White Lotus. Ask the 39-year-old, though, and he’ll tell you he views himself more as a passenger than a driver of monoculture.

“I’m just a barnacle on the side of the ship being like, ‘What a cool ride,’” says Lacy during an interview in New York.

His latest ride is the new Peacock series All Her Fault, out Nov. 6. The drama, based on the Andrea Mara novel of the same name, stars Succession’s Sarah Snook as Marissa Irvine, a woman who goes to pick up her young son from a playdate — only to find that not only was she given the wrong address but her kid has completely disappeared. Lacy plays Marissa’s husband Peter, who is both devastated by the circumstances and trying to carefully manage the situation — perhaps because he has some secrets to hide.

It’s a juicy watch, dappled with shades of Big Little Lies, its mystery wrapped up in the intense marital dramas of wealthy Chicago suburbanites. (The show was actually filmed in Melbourne, Australia.) Marissa and Peter are a finance power couple, with Lacy playing a spin on a micromanaging rich guy.

In person, Lacy’s personality is quite the opposite — warm, boisterous, and eager to dish, yet thoughtful in his responses, taking long pauses before he formulates his phrases. A dad to a 5- and 7-year-old who has ditched New York City for Connecticut, he’s both laid-back and quick to get worked up about the things that bother him. (At one point, we get on a thread about the state of the world and he notes that “capitalism is a grift.”) Ahead, he opens up about his friend-crush on Snook and her husband, his career transition, and what he wants to do next.

It’s all playing pretend, but as a father of two, how did playing a man whose child is in peril affect you?

I have two little kids, and they stayed in the States while we filmed in Australia, so I was away from them for about five and a half months. That sucked, partially for me, but mostly for them. They would send videos where they’re bummed their dad’s not there, and they don’t quite know why. So there’s some understanding of this character of what he’s going through.

But also Peter’s missing a little thing in there that other people have. Peter’s such a narcissist, and there’s really a mix of a father’s love — or paternal instinct, or protection, or care, or any of these selfless things — matched with a true belief in his ownership and control over people and dynamics and relationships. And a confusion on his part [is his thinking], “If you would just do it my way, this wouldn’t be a problem.” There’s fear involved, and then there’s grief involved. The fear is built around Peter’s control, and the grief is built around some bit of humanity that is in him.

I overheard during the photo shoot that you like playing a character who doesn’t have all of the information they need to know. That seems very pertinent to this role.

I’m always trying to figure things out, to my own detriment. Like, “What was that interaction? What was that thing? What are the calculations on that?” My brain is convinced that that will yield serenity, but it instead yields more things to try to figure out. It’s funny to see where people fit on the scale of how much they think they know. Because the older I get, the more I realize how little I know and how much there is to learn — or just be OK not knowing. So in a narrative sense, it’s fun to play a character who is trying to solve a problem, who is trying to get information to move ahead.

And for a while, you were cast in “nice guy” roles. Where do you feel like you are in relation to that now?

There was a long stretch where the majority of the roles I was being cast in were supportive boyfriend, nice guy, that kind of deal. Then there were other projects that weren’t that role, but people weren’t watching. That was true until The White Lotus. And then there’s been a little run, I feel like, of playing rich douchebags.

Did White Lotus feel liberating to you?

Definitely. Mike White sat down with me before we shot and was like, “He’s just trying to have a nice time on vacation, and this thing has happened. That’s all. He’s a good guy. These people are lying to him, and he’s spending $20,000 a night on a room. It’s crazy.” And he was also like, “When you have that level of wealth, there’s a paranoia that sets in about how people are treating you.”

So that, along with feeling like you’ve been done wrong, is this toxic mix — but in his mind, he’s a good guy. And so it was this wonderful marriage of these roles I’d done for 10 years and getting to build this other needy beta thing under it.

How did you navigate the transition from White Lotus to like, “Oh, now this is a different sort of box” — going from “nice guys” to “rich douchebags”?

I think the weirder part is how people respond to me or want to talk to me about those things.

Oh, really?

Oftentimes people’s feelings about those characters are different from my feelings about those characters. With The White Lotus, people would be like, “Oh, we loved you on that show. That guy’s the worst.” And in my mind I’m like, “He doesn’t handle some situations the way I might handle them, but he’s not the worst.” Or the most uncomfortable is when people who I think are cut from a very similar cloth to that character want to talk to me about their judgment of that character. Then there’s a weird moment like, what percentage of self-awareness is being exhibited here?

A lot of time and toil goes into personalizing these things and creating them and wanting to be the very best that they can be. And through no fault of a viewer, but really because of this landscape of content consumption, they’re just bites of food. It’s like somebody worked really hard on what became a crouton at the salad bar and someone goes, “Croutons are good.” And you’re like, “That was a year. That was a year to make that crouton, man.” And they’re like, “It’s not as good as the other croutons. I like the garlic croutons.” And you go, “OK, well I’m just the regular crouton, man. I don’t know what you want me to say.” Anyway, that’s different from the question you asked.

Especially with TV, how have you seen consumption patterns change since you started out?

For about 100 years of cinema and 60 years of television, the assumed monoculture was white people: Friends, Seinfeld, the cast of SNL for about 40 years, with one or two brown people on the show. In a great way, the fracturing of media has allowed for other people’s stories to be elevated and created and financed and shown and supported. At the same time, your personal consumption is so siloed to what will keep your attention. It makes for a weird moment where Barbenheimer was the last ubiquitous, all-encompassing kind of cultural moment. And that doesn’t really exist with TV.

That’s why we still have Tom Cruise as the movie star — it’s very hard to mint a new movie star in box office receipts. We’re pretty good at minting stars based on views and the attention economy, but getting that to translate is tricky.

The algorithm also serves us content to buy when we’re scrolling on our phones. It’s all part of the same noise.

And is that the new default? Or is there a way — this is going to be a hard sell, but I think the fact that the Times did a thing this summer about Diet Coke and cigarettes, there’s some kind of tangible naughtiness in being like, “I’m doing a thing that’s actually not good for me. It’s OK because I can touch it and feel it and smoke it, too.”

I was living it this summer, just back smoking again, partially just being like, “What are you going to do?” Like, you’re going to come for me because I’m having a cigarette? Get out of here. Certain things I want to go, “Can we turn the dial back to film in the mid-’80s and TV in the mid-’90s — but can we push racial progress forward?” But there are some things that I do want to go back to and be like, “Let’s make cigarettes and coffee cool again.”

Like David Lynch. RIP.

Fully. And then he was like, “I have emphysema, and that’s what happens when you smoke for 50 years.” You know that comedian Chris Fleming? He’s got a great thing about how a leading man used to be a guy who came out from behind a dumpster that you wouldn’t trust to hold a bicycle for 10 minutes. And now it’s like, everything’s very clean because there’s a lot of money involved — “You’re not going to punch the maître d’ right?” It’s like, if that happens, you go, “We’re all done with you.” You don’t have your job anymore. And probably for the best. That behavior is not OK, but we want both sides a little bit. We want someone who looks like a bad boy but is actually a very nice man.

Exactly.

There’s something riveting on screen. I don’t know Tom Hardy, I think he’s an incredible actor, but he also does jiu-jitsu. He’s a strong motherf*cker. You see him on camera and you’re like, “That guy might hit someone. This is interesting.” Adam Driver’s the same. You go, “Damn, that dude might flip a table right now. That’s pretty cool.”

And then there’s probably some, myself included, who are playing at that a little, to be like, “I could flip a table.” Like, you’re not going to flip a f*cking table.

It feels like the weight is bearing down on everyone right now. Do you feel like, especially living in Connecticut, having young kids, impacts what you want to pursue creatively?

It’s always been a balance of finances and creativity. When I was 27, it was just like, “How do I pay this rent?” And I’m so lucky to be on something that people think is cool — not that that was by design.

But now it’s very different. This whole year I’ve been in the States, which has been amazing. That hasn’t happened in a decade. So it really is just like, “Can my family come with me? How much are they going to pay me? And is it creatively fulfilling, or does it make sense career-wise?” A year ago, when they called about All Her Fault, the industry had slowed way down. It’s a thing I wanted to be a part of, but the reality was going, “It’s this or probably nothing until the second quarter of 2025.” Even if that wasn’t the case, I would’ve done this job because I love Sarah, I like the part, I like the script. So yeah, as a dad with a mortgage, do you want to pay that mortgage or not? Luckily it was a wonderful experience and a great product, and that to me is the greatest thing — where you’re like, “How lucky are you for those to line up?”

I’d love to know more about what it takes for a project to pique your interest these days.

I had met Sarah and her husband at an event and I was like, “Those are the coolest people. They’re just the best.” Then, my agents were like, “There’s a thing that will go at the end of the year that Sarah is doing, and you’re right for the husband.” And then a month before we got cooking they said, “You have the offer if you’d like to do it.” With Sarah being involved, it would have to be an awful role for me to say no to — I just love her work.

Once you were on set, what was the status of your friend-crush on Sarah and her husband?

We had a good crew. It was like Jay Ellis and Dakota Fanning and Sarah and myself, Abby Elliott, Sophia Lillis. There was a pizza place called Deep End that I scouted out because I love pizza — and shout out to Deep End, we would go there once a week. First it was Michael Peña and Jay and I, and then we were like, “We really should get other people involved.” And so I would see those guys once or twice a week, which was really sweet.

Looking ahead, what are the areas you want to move into next?

I want to write and produce and direct. The enthusiasm that I have on set as an actor is still there, but in the last three or four years, I’ve been excited and enthusiastic and fulfilled by asking, “How are you going to shoot that? What lens do you have on there?” There’s a whole other world that’s also creatively fulfilling — building something from the ground-up or seeing playback and going, “Oh, I know what needs to happen here.” I really like those big-picture discussions about narrative and story and character.

To use a metaphor with crayons: They gave me the set of 96 colors, and that’s been awesome. And then in the last couple years they’re like, “There’s also markers.” And you’re like, “Oh sh*t! You guys had markers? F*ck! Cool!”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.