Pedro Pascal remembers his “amateurish” Game of Thrones audition

Following his time as Oberyn Martell on Game of Thrones, Pedro Pascal has become a Hollywood golden boy, having landed key roles in everything from Wonder Woman 1984 to The Mandalorian to HBO’s upcoming adaptation of The Last of Us. The HBO fantasy show was the perfect launching pad to take his career to another level, but he almost didn’t get past the audition.

Last year, Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff threw some shade at Pascal for his “amateurish” attempt at filming his audition tape for the show. Basically, his audition was filmed on an iPhone, in typical portrait selfie-style; not the most elegant way to get a role on the biggest show in the world. “And this wasn’t one of the new-fangled iPhones with the fancy cameras,” he told Variety. “It looked like shit; it was shot vertical; the whole thing was very amateurish.”

If you’re curious about what his audition looked like, there’s a tiny clip of it in this video, around 22 seconds in:

Pascal recently gave his side of the story, adding that he didn’t have enough time to do it how he would’ve liked. “It’s true, I had my friend tape me with my iPhone,” Pascal told Esquire. “They sent me like 20 something pages to do which obviously in the time that they wanted the tape to be turned in I wasn’t going to be able to memorize all those lines.”

"The easiest way was for somebody to sit in front of you with an iPhone and then just kind of like have the pages down here and read it casually, and the suckers fell for it. Is that my fault? No, it’s theirs."

It must’ve been some audition.

Pedro Pascal considers his Game of Thrones death a career high 

Understatement of the day: Game of Thrones had a lot of deaths. In fact, according to an infographic from The Washington Post, there were 6,887 in total. Oberyn Martell has the honor of getting one of the top three death scenes in the series. How can we forget when he had his skull crushed by The Mountain?

Pascal doesn’t think any future on-screen deaths will ever top that. “Makes me feel like a boss, if I’m actually up there and if I’m in the top three, I mean then like everything after is a bit futile,” he joked. “It’s like, what am I doing? Why am I still trying? I did it.”

The Game of Thrones universe will continue with the spinoff House of the Dragon on August 21. Pascal will continue to show up in all corners of pop culture. He’s already a familiar face in Westeros and in Star Wars. Surely an MCU role will arrive at some point?

Currently, you can see Pascal alongside Nicolas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

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