Pedro Pascal explains how Narcos, his new series, is like Game of Thrones
By Dan Selcke
“We don’t need dragons. We got cocaine!”
Let it never be said that Pedro Pascal can’t come up with a good sound bite. The actor talked recently about Narcos, his upcoming 10-episode Netflix series about the hunt for legendary drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, and dropped that little bon mot in the process. In you’re going to be asked about your time on Game of Thrones for the rest of your career, you might as well have fun with it.
To be fair, Pascal also drew a couple of more substantive comparisons between the two shows. “There’s the size of the story,” he said. “Game of Thrones would take a lot of inspiration from the story of what went down in Colombia and the war that was fought.” That’s makes sense enough. There’s bound to be more than a few double-crosses and bloody murders in a story about taking down a notorious drug lord. (Pascal, for the record, plays a Mexican DEA agent named Javier Pena.) Maintaining power in Westeros, a place where the law only nominally keeps the whims of the ruling class in check, is probably pretty similar to maintaining power at the top of a drug ring, where the law won’t stop the ambitious from taking you down by any means necessary.
Pascal also talked about both show’s fondness for location shooting.
"The thing that seems most important was capturing the physical environment we were in. When I got to Croatia for Thrones and we were shooting over the Adriatic Sea and thinking that as a fan I thought it was CGI. My physical experience similar [on Narcos] where I’m in these physical locations and what you see is what you get.”"
We can all find out whether cocaine really does serve as a good substitute for dragons when Narcos debuts on August 28.
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