The world has fallen head over heels in love with Pedro Pascal and that’s only slightly to do with his dashing good looks.
Every time the 50-year-old actor gets in front of a camera or speaks to a journalist in an interview, he demonstrates that his charm also comes from his kindness and charisma, just as much as his sleek sense of style.
That’s no less evident in Pascal’s recent interview with Vanity Fair’s Karen Valby, where he touches on seemingly every significant moment of his life – and reminds us that even the most seemingly lofty of celebrities has fears and qualms in common with the rest of us.
Pascal starts off by discussing his young adulthood, when he relied on friends and family to survive throughout his 20s and 30s, chasing the dream of being an actor.
“In my 30s, I was supposed to have a career,” he said. “Past 29 without a career meant that it was over, definitely.
“Basically, everybody took care of me, well into my 30s. I had angels around me the whole time.”
With the success we know associate with Pascal not coming until he took Game of Thrones fans by storm as Oberyn Martell in 2014.
In the meantime, he remembers struggling financially – and grieving the fact that he couldn’t give his pit-bull-mix rescue Gretta the life he would be able to now.
“She saved my life, that dog, because she gave me someone to go home to,” Pascal remembered, speaking of the dog who died soon after getting hired on Thrones.
“I think about how poor I was when I had Gretta,” Pascal said. “I think about when I had double shifts and I couldn’t find anybody to let her out and we were living in this shithole apartment in Red Hook, and I think about the bougie life she would be leading with me now as opposed to then and I grieve, I really do.”
From the mouths of friends
Virtually everyone who comes into contact with Pascal has good things to say, from coworkers to family and long-term friends.
Indeed, the honest and kind face that Pascal presents to the world seems to be the one that those who know him best get too, with co-stars Bella Ramsay and Vanessa Kirby (from The Last of Us and The Fantastic Four respectively) both being wholly complimentary and even protective of him
Kirby described “his immense vulnerability”, adding: “He doesn’t have much armor, so he shows himself to you straight away, and you trust that person because he’s revealing himself to you in this very brave way.”
Age is not just a number
Celebrities are often expected to age with grace and without complaint, although they’ll be chastised for doing it ‘wrong’.
Pascal himself said that recently turning 50 felt ‘vulnerable’, much more so than turning 40.
“What a silly thing for a 50-year-old man—to have all this attention!” he said. “This is such shadow-voice s***, you know what I mean?”
No matter who you are, your body will start to slow down and Pascal is no exception. Indeed, having the world’s eyes on you and being complimented on your universal sex appeal at the Critics Choice Awards, can be jarring, as Pascal recalls: “I was in a sling, I was overweight, and when the camera cut to me, I didn’t think anything could be further from the truth.”
Dealing with injuries to his back and shoulder while filming Materialists last spring opposite Dakota Johnson in his first romance, he was out of the sling but still limited in movement and strength.
“It was the oldest I’d ever felt in life,” he explained. “It was the weakest I’d ever felt. It was such a scary, fraudulent thing to feel like I could play somebody who was the catch of Manhattan.”
Putting the world to rights
Another part of what makes Pascal so popular is his open support for causes he believes in, not least trans rights, a topic Pascal has been vocal about in part due to love for his younger trans sister, Lux.
Yet the need to stand up against injustices goes back years and is something he grappled with as a young man.
“I was having a really hard time when I was 18, 19, 20,” Pascal said. “I was struggling really badly with insomnia. I was reading James Baldwin and watching movies like Once Were Warriors and Muriel’s Wedding. I just was like an open wound to the reality of life.
“It sounds so pretentious, but I felt at this crossroads of coming into an understanding of what an unjust world we live in. This world, and its lack of equanimity, is just too painful to bear. How do you live in it?”
A few decades on and Pascal is living in it by calling out what he sees as unjust, like calling JK Rowling a “heinous loser” after she gloried in a UK Supreme Court decision limiting the legal definition of a woman to the basis of biological sex.
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It wasn’t a thoughtless move for Pascal to call her out on social media, with him saying: “The one thing that I would say I agonised over a little bit was just, ‘Am I helping? Am I fucking helping?’ It’s a situation that deserves the utmost elegance so that something can actually happen, and people will actually be protected.
“Listen, I want to protect the people I love. But it goes beyond that. Bullies make me f***ing sick.”
