Is Pedro Pascal getting overexposed?

The other week, rumors spread online about actor Pedro Pascal being in talks to play Reed Richards in a new Fantastic Four movie, the first to be formally integrated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While it’s true that the MCU isn’t the cultural juggernaut it once was, superheroes are still very popular, and playing one still seems like a rite of passage for any aspiring movie star.

That certainly describes Pedro Pascal. Over the past few years, he’s approached something like ubiquity, appearing not just in a lot of movies and TV shows but a lot of popular, big-name movies and TV shows. He plays the title character in The Mandalorian. He played villain Max Lord in Wonder Woman 1984, a sequel to a hugely successful DC superhero movie that none of us could know would turn out that bad. Earlier this year, he starred in the universally lauded The Last of Us. He’s going to work with Ridley Scott on Gladiator 2, and now he may be Mister Fantastic.

That is a lot of high-profile roles in a short span of time. At this point, Pascal and Jason Momoa are unquestionably the two biggest breakout stars from Game of Thrones, which isn’t the result I would have predicted back when that show was airing.

But is it too much of a good thing? By seeking out all of these major roles, is Pascal creating a situation where we, the general public, will get sick of him? Short answer: I don’t think so. Long answer below.

Why Pedro Pascal isn’t overexposed even though he’s in everything

Comparing Momoa and Pascal is a good place to start, because their journeys have been similar, at least at the start. They each blew up after playing scene-stealing characters on Game of Thrones, both of whom were introduced and killed off in the space of one season. That meant they were free to capitalize on their fame immediately, since they didn’t have to return to film another season of TV over the course of several months.

After Game of Thrones, Pascal appeared on the Netflix show Narcos, a gritty drama about drug trafficking. This was before he was ubiquitous. He gives a grounded, layered performance; this is Pascal as actor, not movie star. He doesn’t stand out but blends with the ensemble. It was a nice feather in his cap.

The turning point for Pascal came when he got cast as Din Djarin in The Mandalorian. That role may require him to wear a helmet most of the time, but it also marked the end of his anonymity; you can’t play the lead in the first-ever live-action Star Wars TV show and not become a household name.

And Pascal seemed comfortable with that new notoriety, appearing in Wonder Woman 1984 the next year. True, that movie was a big of a mess and didn’t come out in theaters thanks to the pandemic, but it was still a role in a major motion picture about superheroes, which means big money and lots of eyeballs. He followed that up with roles in movies like We Can Be Heroes and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. By the time Pascal hosted Saturday Night Live to promote The Last of Us in 2023, it was official: this guy was everywhere.

Through it all, Pascal has remained very popular with audiences. There has not been cancelled, he has appeared in a string of bad projects. That last part is very important. Pascal doesn’t just work a lot; he seems to have a great instinct for the kinds of roles he should be playing, and when he should be playing them. He appears in hugely popular projects like The Mandalorian and The Last of Us, but he doesn’t repeat himself. In both of those projects, he’s an actor first and a movie star second, which is to say he altered his acting to fit the role rather than the other way around.

That’s in contrast to movie stars like Dwayne Johnson or Ryan Reynolds, who adhere to an older model of stardom: they choose a “type” (stoic-yet-approachable badass for Johnson and motor-mouthed self-aware smartass for Reynolds) and play that type in more or less everything they do. I don’t say that to put them down — that’s a completely legitimate way to approach an acting career and they’re both very good at it — but to contrast them with Pascal, who seems on his way to achieving super-stardom based on his versatility as an actor, which is harder to do. Meryl Streep comes to mind as an example of someone who’s been doing it successfully for years.

And you can see that Pascal doesn’t just want to make mass market fare, as much of it as he’s in. In The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, he plays a crime kingpin who’s also a superfan of Nicolas Cage, who plays himself. Pascal starred alongside Ethan Hawke in Strange Way of Life, a short film from famed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. While you’re unlikely to see Reynolds or Johnson participate in projects that don’t have mass appeal or the promise of a big paycheck, Pascal is happy to stretch his acting muscles on smaller projects in between the bigger ones.

But also, while neither The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent nor Strange Way of Life were big hits, they did get talked about, which again underlines how Pascal has a knack for picking projects even when they’re not his big money-makers. I think that knack accounts for why he doesn’t feel overexposed, despite how ubiquitous he is. He hasn’t really chosen wrong yet. He has the acting chops to ensure that we won’t get bored with his performances no matter how many he gives, and he’s giving the right ones.

So sure, give Pascal the role of Reed Richards. He’s just flexible enough to pull it off.

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