In the world of prestige sci-fi, Foundation reigns as the biggest sleeper hit. Mention the Apple TV+ adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s classic series in a group of friends and you’ll suddenly find everyone has been secretly watching it. Something of a flawed masterpiece, the show, which wraps its third season Friday, has been averaging about 1.5 million hours watched per week in the US over the last month, according to Luminate. Not Wednesday numbers, but in the same ballpark as other genre fare like HBO Max’s Peacemaker.
Reasons for the show’s popularity are many, but it’s seemed to have gained traction as it’s become more, well, relevant. The series, like Asimov’s books, focuses on a group of economists using a predictive algorithm to guide the destiny of humanity through the collapse of a galactic empire. Wealthy and powerful people have also found ways to clone themselves and all but live forever. Artificial intelligence and longevity advocates? In 2025, Foundation has proven to be not only one of the smartest sci-fi shows on TV, but also one one of the most prescient.
But there’s another appeal for a, shall we say, more specific subset of fans: an oft-shirtless—and for narrative reasons, navel-less—Lee Pace. The Halt and Catch Fire actor plays Cleon, an emperor who achieved immortality of a sort through unusual means. Pace embodies many versions of Cleon, all clones of a long-dead original who created a system in which there are, at any one time, three copies of himself lording over the galaxy. The youngest is known as Brother Dawn; the oldest as Brother Dusk. Paramount among them is Pace’s Brother Day.
Pace clearly enjoys the challenge. Fans enjoy watching him ruthlessly destroy planets and take psychedelic trips, the latter leading them to dub him Brother Dude, after Jeff Bridges’ character in The Big Lebowski. He also appreciates his show’s deeply cerebral bent. When WIRED spoke to him from the set of Practical Magic 2 in London, he was eager to discuss the nature of a clone’s consciousness, carrying around robot heads, and his hopes for the show’s fourth season, which Apple TV+ announced on Thursday. He was also eager to share some of his on-set photos with us (see below).
This interview has been edited for clarity and length and to make the interviewer sound more coherent. It contains lots of spoilers.
TIM MARCHMAN: One of the things that’s really exciting about Foundation is how it projects out current trends. I think this is one of the more serious treatments of cloning and AI technology that we've seen. Do you think of the various Cleons as entirely independent entities, or one person who's on a continuum over thousands of years?
LEE PACE: So that’s kind of the riddle we set up with Cleon. The idea we begin with is that they’re the same person. On Foundation you’ve got these characters that have figured out a way to cheat death, one way or another. You've got Gaal, who sleeps through time; you've got Hari Seldon, who digitizes his consciousness; you've got Demerzel the robot [who has lived thousands of years and serves as aide, mother, and sometimes even lover to generations of Cleons after being enslaved by his dynasty], and you’ve got Cleon, the emperor, who died hundreds of years ago, but he's cloning himself under this fantasy that it's the same person.