At 50 years old, Pedro Pascal might just be the biggest actor in the world. If you don't believe me, watch him look back on his career in a new feature from Vanity Fair, and you'll remember just how many big roles he's had over the past 10 years.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
That said, Pascal was working for a long time before he broke out. One of his earliest onscreen parts was as a college student named Eddie in a 1999 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eddie befriends Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) before getting promptly turned into a vampire and having to fight her later on. It's very entertaining to watch a young Pascal long before he blew up.
"This is one of the biggest jobs I ever got in my life," Pascal remembered. "Everybody was dying to be on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So when I got the season four premiere episode, I couldn't believe it. I just knew how badly everybody wanted to get on this show. So freshly out of school, to get on, and I was like, 'Well, I'm shooting to the top.' And then I died after one scene."
Pascal reserved a lot of praise for Gellar, a big TV star at the time. "Sarah was amazing. She took very good care of me. She taught me 'tricks of the trade' in a way, because it was one of the first on-camera jobs that I'd ever gotten," he said. "Tricks on how to kind of find your mark that I have kept with me to this day. She invited me, and she had her friends with her, and they had ice cream. And she was like, 'Do you want some ice cream?' And I got to have ice cream with her and her girlfriends, and it made me feel really special...No wonder people were so obsessed with the show. She's so good."
Game of Thrones
Pascal worked on TV and in theater for years afterwards, but he got his big break in his mid-30s playing the charismatic Oberyn Martell on Game of Thrones, which was then a major TV phenomenon.
“It was a game changer,” Pascal said. “It's the reason that I'm here now, I think...I still can't believe it happened that [showrunners] David Benioff [and] Dan Weiss would take this chance...They could have had whoever they wanted and that they actually paid attention to somebody who had a lot of, you know, regional theater, Off-Broadway work and episodic television on their résumé to step into this kind of a part in the height of their popularity. And to this day, I kind of am indebted to them for my career.”
Oberyn was a fan favorite from the start, but what really secured Pascal's popularity was his death scene, which is one of the best scenes on a show known for death scenes. Oberyn fights Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane (Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson) in a trial by combat. He almost wins, starts grandstanding, and then the Mountain brutally murders him, knocking out his teeth and then crushing his head with his bare hands. You couldn't forget Pascal after that if you wanted to.
“Oh, it’s horrible,” Pascal said as he watched the scene. “Those are my teeth flying. This is perverse. That’s disgusting.”
"As violent as it looks, he [Björnsson] was very gently pressing up against my eyes. You’d think his entire weight would be on me with that costume. I didn’t feel him at all. He held his weight. So we’re really just acting there."
Pascal if full of praise for Björnsson, as he is for pretty much all his costars throughout this career. “I was obsessed with the show [beforehand],” he said. “Getting to go and be with this ensemble and on those locations in a comfortable costume and in a really good role? I could barely f------ believe what was happening to me, to be honest with you.”
The Mandalorian
Pascal parlayed his Game of Thrones fame into a starring role in The Mandalorian, the first-ever live-action Star Wars TV show. That one is still paying dividends; he'll headling a movie called The Mandalorian & Grogu next year.
Pascal shares the show with Grogu, a little Baby Yoda character played by a puppet. "The puppet work is unbelievable on Grogu," Pascal said. He watched the scene from the season 2 finale where his character removes his helmet, a very rare thing, to look at Grogu with his own eyes. Pascal revealed that there was actually supposed to be another scene where Mando took off his helmet, but he talked with showrunner Jon Favreau and they changed it.
"Jon Favreau is so collaborative that I remember having a conversation and there was an episode... it was before [The Mandalorian season 2 finale]. And maybe he had already had this planned already, but I remember talking to Jon and saying, 'If there was a moment where I took off the helmet, I think we should really hold off, and it should be because the Child needs to see my face, breaking the Creed completely just because I want to introduce my soul to Grogu," Pascal said. "My idea was in a different spot, and then Jon ended up making it a much, much, much better part of the series, but I really felt heard, and it was really special for it to become the moment that it became, because it was somewhat of a collaborative thing."
Whenever Mando takes off his helmet, it's an event, so I think Pascal had good instincts there.
The Last of Us
Pascal next got one of the lead roles in The Last of Us, a huge HBO show based off a phenomenally popular video game series. Vanity Fair wanted him to watch the scene where his character Joel finally comes clean with surrogate daughter Ellie in the sixth episode of season 2, but it seems like it's too much of a raw nerve. "I don't wanna see it!" Pascal said. "I could talk about it?"
"This was one of the hardest and easiest...days of work I've ever had," Pascal said. "We did this scene all day long."
"It was just really f***ing intense. It was an easy day of shooting, we were beautifully taken care of by Neil Druckmann who was directing the episode. Bella and I are like linked souls and this was the ultimate manifestation of that as scene partners on this porch. And so we took such good care of each other and just kind of like lived in the pain of it the entire day. I remember just being absolutely like emptied out by the end of the day."
That scene is a hardcore tear-jerker, and that was for me sitting at home; I can't imagine how much more intense it must have been to play it. "I knew that it was ending, that my run on the show was coming to an end," Pascal continued. "And then you think about what the story is, it was just sort of like living the story out, and having all of the nuance of what my relationship to my scene partner was in the experience of doing the show. And the idea of hurting them, the idea of losing them...those things just broke my heart."
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Continuing his hot streak, Pascal will next appear in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which looks like the buzziest Marvel movie to come out in a while. He's playing Mister Fantastic, one of the most iconic superheroes in the whole of the Marvel canon, so once again, there are tons of eyes on him.
“I’m more aware of disgruntlement around my casting than anything I’ve ever done. ‘He’s too old. He’s not right. He needs to shave,'" Pascal said. But it sounds like the joy of the work has helped push those voices aside. "It's been a dream to join the MCU," he said. “I have never been around such talented f—ers in my life."
The Fantastic Four: First Steps lands in theaters on July 25. There's nothing left to do but watch it, although I did like this tidbit about the producers having to tell Pascal to stop doing an accent: "They had to keep pulling me back from a very mid-Atlantic early '60s kind of talk...They were like, 'Talk more like yourself,' and I had a hard time doing that, because I was so into the era."
And we didn't even touch on other Pedro Pascal projects like Narcos and his new movie Eddington, also out next month. So is Pedro Pascal the biggest actor in the world? He's on the shortlist, surely. Debate amongst yourselves.
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