#pp article

By Seb Emina • Photographer: Ethan James Green From Fantastic Man n° 42 – 2026

Pedro Pascal - How great to be him

The fabulous actor known as Pedro Pascal lives a busy life as a beloved and bankable Hollywood star. His fans obsess over his every movement and coffee order and cry inconsolably when his characters meet a tragic end. He is the face that Chanel turn to when they want someone handsome and cultured to model their finest eyewear. What is particularly remarkable is that his big break only came in his late thirties. Prior to that he had been a struggling actor with a few minor TV parts, years working in regional theatres and a side hustle as a New York City waiter. His rise has been phenomenal but also steady, built on a number of roles both in television and film that have completely won over audiences. It’s also been aided by an easy-going and outspoken realness that comes from a life spent living mostly as a regular person. People love Pedro, and he gladly, calmly, accepts their adulation. He has arrived. And he is only just getting started.

1. DEAR

Pedro – Hi Mingo, gorgeous honey. Sweetheart, huh? Oh, Mingo, you look great.

Seb – Who are you talking to?

P – My friend’s dog.

Pedro Pascal is in a sunny garden in Los Angeles. He has a slightly elongated chevron moustache and is wearing a white T-shirt with some sort of paper stuffed into the collar. Behind him, a hosepipe is hooped around a tap. In that Hollywood way, he resembles both himself and the sum of his roles. It’s the hair, the smile, the charisma, the intensity: he’s a bisexual warrior, a superhero dad, a DEA agent, a post-apocalyptic smuggler. He reaches up and removes the bits of paper in a series of quick, precise movements.

“I was getting a haircut,” he says. “A dear friend of mine who lives here in LA has a very tiny window, because she’s very busy, so I had to come and steal her time.”

He often uses that phrase: “dear friend.” You sense that he is an excellent friend. He’s in the top percentile of famous men and as far as I can gather is subject to a gruelling nonstop schedule, yet he seems so relaxed, and so happy to chat, that you could imagine he is, in fact, on holiday.

2. DEER

There is much talk, on the day we speak, about Pedro’s appearance in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time show. Amid the wow-inducing, historic spectacle, our subject was glimpsed inside the convivial pink house – known as “La Casita” – that often appears at the rapper’s concerts. It was filled, as it tends to be, with people dancing energetically.

P – I wanted to participate in any way – literally a volunteer position, like serving coffee if needed – and I put the feelers out through people I work with. When it comes to representation synchronised with celebration there’s no one better than Benito at the moment, and that fills me with inspiration outside of just being super into his music. Then I went straight into shooting this project with Tony Gilroy named ‘Behemoth!’. I was on set every day, and if I wasn’t shooting, then I was in a cello lesson. Afterwards I was lamenting about not hearing back and I sent someone an email with a selfie of me sticking my tongue out, being, like, “It’s really me.” Within 25 minutes, they called me back and they were, like, “We want you to come to the show.”

S – Did you know what would happen when you got there?

P – I was under the impression that I would be in a suite. There was a dress code – “wear beige” – but I thought it was in case there’d be a photographer. So we’re up in the stands watching the game and somebody pulls me from my seat and takes me backstage and then there’s Cardi B and there’s Young Miko and Karol G and Jessica Alba. They do a wardrobe check and then they tell me, “Okay, so the vibe is: you’re dancing.” I started to realise right before they started, and I was, like, “It’s the Casita. I’m such a fucking idiot. Oh my god, I’m going to be in the Casita,” as I was being marched out into the field. So I think that’s why I seemed like a deer in headlights.

3. GEN X, TAIL END OF

As of last year, the following men, and everyone else born in 1975, have existed in the 21st century for longer than they did in the 20th: David Beckham, Tiger Woods, Jamie Oliver, Declan Donnelly, 50 Cent, Tobey Maguire, will.i.am, Pedro Pascal. By quite some margin, Pedro is the only man from that list whose years of being famous (12) are fewer than his years of not being famous (39).

During his non-famous period, Pedro worked as a waiter and/or bartender at various New York addresses such as Ruby Foo’s on Broadway, a legendary 300-seat pan-Asian restaurant; Flamingo East on Second Avenue, a restaurant and club that hosted LGBTQ parties including Chip Duckett’s ‘POP ROCKS!’ (Pedro bartended at the much-loved ‘Salon Wednesdays’); Time Cafe and Fez in the West Village, a hip restaurant with live music and a Moroccan-themed lounge (Pedro was fired from bartending in the latter); and a Cuban-Mexican place called Cafe Habana, on Elizabeth Street in Nolita, which is unfortunately the only member of this list that remains open.

“That’s just to name a few,” he adds. “There are even more, if you can believe it.”

4. ALREADY BAKED

S – You rose to fame relatively late in your career arc. Has that ever resulted in you suffering from some kind of imposter syndrome?

P – I think there are two ways of looking at it. There’s a universal feeling of imposter syndrome that we all can experience when we’re being unkind to ourselves, especially if it’s somehow uncomfortable to get what you want. Then the kinder side of it is that, as old as I feel, and as silly as some of it can be – because of “What is a 50-year-old man doing dancing in La Casita?” – I’m incredibly grateful for having been a fully developed character before experiencing any kind of large-scale exposure. I’m kind of out of the oven, already baked. I was 38 years old when I got the part of Oberyn Martell. I’d already been part of a theatre community for years and years. It saved my creative soul. Ten years of working at different restaurants, and just cutting my teeth. Twenty years working regionally in theatre, doing episodic television. Whether I liked it or not, these things were in place for me. And that doesn’t mean, “Hey, this is great because I know who I am and I love who I am.” It’s not that simple. It’s more like, “Whether I like it or not, I am who I am.”

S – Was it really as sudden as the picture that others have painted? Or did you have levels of success that you hit? I mean, was there a time when you could finally support yourself just from acting? Was that a kind of success as well?

P – It was paycheque to paycheque, but the theatre work became somewhat consistent for a few years. And then you always felt like it was this enormous score if you got an episode of ‘Law & Order’ or something. I was scraping by. I got bailed out a lot over the years by my sister and friends. But the big change really was with ‘Game of Thrones’, and then I’ve been just ridiculously fortunate to follow it up with something like ‘Narcos’ and the early period of original content coming out of Netflix, and then ‘The Mandalorian’, which was a whole other level, and then ‘The Last of Us’, which was a planet-sized gift.

5. THE GLORY THAT WAS

In the period 2006–2011, Pedro played four different characters in the extended Law & Order universe…

‘Law & Order: Criminal Intent’ Season 6, Episode 10: ‘Weeping Willow’ Aired: 28 November 2006

Pedro is Reggie Luckman, an actor involved in a fake kidnapping plot who has voluminous hair parted at the side.

‘Law & Order’ Season 18, Episode 10: ‘Tango’ Aired: 27 February 2008

Pedro is Tito Cabassa, a thug and criminal. He’s wearing a black leather jacket and has short hair in a sort of basin haircut with sideburns.

‘Law & Order: Criminal Intent’ Season 8, Episode 8: ‘The Glory That Was’ Aired: 14 June 2009

Pedro is Kevin “Kip” Green, a publicist entangled in a sex-tape blackmail case. He’s wearing a black blazer over a blue V-neck jumper, with swept-back, well-coiffed hair.

‘Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’ Season 12, Episode 24: ‘Smoked’ Aired: 18 May 2011

Pedro is Greer, a corrupt officer at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He’s wearing a light-blue shirt, a stripy tie, smart camel trousers and a service weapon.

6. STYLING AND GROOMING

Pedro’s red carpet looks can be offbeat, subversive or hallucinatory. He wore oversized trousers with a black Dior suit at the Cannes premier of ‘Eddington’, in which he plays a Covid-era mayor, and a polka-dot jacquard blouse at the Berlin premiere of ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’, where he’s the clever but stretchy Mr. Fantastic. After taking a fall at his father’s house in Chile, Pedro appeared at a spree of award ceremonies with an arm in a sling that perfectly matched the rest of his outfit. “Mr. Pascal has incorporated the sling into his overall look, turning medical equipment into a distinctive accessory,” observed a ‘New York Times’ report in January of 2024.

Lately, Pedro has been inducted into the rarefied world of male Chanel ambassadors. But what’s his relationship with clothes in general?

“I think in my day-to-day I cycle between five T-shirts and I’m still pretending like it’s lockdown,”

he says.

“But I’m learning, and you know what? It’s never too late to learn. I love to look at a rack and I love to collaborate. I have a big eye for how I want to express myself when it comes to anything that is going to have exposure.”

Pedro’s career turning point coincided exactly with the arrival of his trademark moustache. It makes you wonder: might a person drift through life never quite realising their ultimate facial-hair setup? Not to doubt Pedro’s acting talent as the key of all factors, but when you look at his earlier work in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ or ‘The Good Wife’ or ‘NYPD Blue’, it’s a very much less defined brand of masculinity on display.

“I’d never had the courage to sport facial hair of any kind because I felt like I grew such weak facial hair. To this day, I can’t grow a proper beard,” he says. “The role where I was assisted with specific facial-hair grooming was that of Oberyn Martell. Then came ‘Narcos’, in which I felt like a moustache was completely fitting for the period. So now I sort of cling a little to the vanity of having some definition in the face with my very weak, patchy facial hair. But if the role calls for it, it can all disappear.”

Pedro is interesting in the shower as well.

“I can’t finish one without making it freezing for two minutes,” he says.

7. THE WAY I WAS RAISED

Pedro was born in Santiago, Chile in the early days of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. With his parents having been listed as enemies of the state, the family fled when he was nine months old, settling in San Antonio, Texas and then later in Orange County, California. Pedro’s mother died when he was 24; he has a tattoo of her signature on his wrist. Two of his three siblings also work in show business: Javiera Balmaceda is a producer, and Lux Pascal is an actor (Lux came out as transgender in 2021). Pedro is open about his progressive politics and has no qualms about using his platform to talk about issues including ICE, Palestine, trans rights or indeed the political situation in Chile.

“I think staying quiet is the harder path. I would have too hard of a time living with myself,”

he says.

“It’s the way I was raised. Decency and compassion. The idea of the vulnerable being scapegoated and terrorised in this way is unspeakably painful.”

8. ADDITIONAL INFO

Immediately before this interview, Pedro was listening to ‘The Piano: Music from the Motion Picture’ by Michael Nyman. The last book he read was ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ by Barbara Kingsolver. The last meal he enjoyed intensely was a Shake Shack double cheeseburger and cheese fries. He has a conflicted passion for rollercoasters:

“I hate the idea of getting hurt and yet I love daredevil-y experiences. I just don’t want it to come with bruises of any kind.”

9. COMING ATTRACTIONS

Not long before we speak, an announcement is made: Pedro will star alongside Danny Ramirez in ‘De Noche’, a gay romance directed by Todd Haynes that follows “two men in love who leave Los Angeles for Mexico in the 1930s.” The shooting of that film is looming, as is promoting ‘The Mandalorian & Grogu’, the movie spin-off of the popular Star Wars TV franchise.

About the aforementioned ‘Behemoth!’ not much is known besides what Pedro tells me here.

S – Why were you taking cello lessons?

P – Because in ‘Behemoth!’ I play a cellist. It’s an incredible love letter to music and – in my own personal interpretation – to how, if you’re listening, your own life experience is its own piece of music. It’s the highs, the lows, the flourishes – the moments of paralysis and development, of forwards and backwards and the “Where is this going?” and “How is this going to end?” experience of music that is life.

S – With ‘The Mandalorian & Grogu’, is there a memory or a moment that encapsulates the experience of shooting that film?

P – I got to be in water more than I ever have been on a set. Some people would think that would be hell, but I quite loved it. I’m more comfortable in water than I am on the land.

S – What can you tell me about your character in ‘De Noche’?

P – He’s a homicide detective in 1938, Los Angeles, one would assume a World War I veteran. And the one thing I’ll share, because I hate the idea of spoiling anything or shaping any particular expectation, is that one of my favourite movies is ‘Chinatown’, and the idea of stepping into a genre I identify as neo-noir, under a lens like Todd’s, is just total fantasy fulfilment. I think the underbelly portrayed in this genre, its otherness, its dangerous atmosphere – how it’s almost like the oxygen that everyone is breathing is heightened with danger – is fascinating.

10. THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Something has been seriously gnawing at me for the duration of the interview and is yet to be addressed. I am talking to the man who plays Mr. Fantastic, in a film called ‘The Fantastic Four’, for the pages of the magazine Fantastic Man.

S – When you think about the word “fantastic,” what springs to mind?

By Esma Annemon Dil • Photo by: Doug Inglish  Related: photoshoot / list of articles / Auf Deutch

It's almost eerie how empty the streets of Los Angeles are under the bright sun. While Europe is groping its way into its “new normal”, here in LA even those who are not neurotic are still apprehensive. Many of them haven't met their friends for six months. The pandemic is out of control. The reactions to it, too. Inviting someone to the garden for a “distance drink” can lead to exactly the same amount of annoyance as suggesting a partner swap.

It was all the more surprising that Pedro Pascal immediately accepted. So for a drink, not to swap partners. He's one of the big climbers of the year - and if Corona hadn't put the film industry on compulsory leave, there probably wouldn't have been time for this drink. After “Game of Thrones”, the series in which his skull was suddenly crushed, the lead role in “Narcos” followed in 2015 as a DEA agent on the hunt for Pablo Escobar, and now the step into the big Hollywood cinema. From October 1st, the native Chilean will appear in the blockbuster "Wonder Woman 1984". In addition, the second season of the “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian” starts in October on Disney+ with him in the lead role - but under his helmet. And somehow we are all under a helmet in 2020. We want to meet this man who worked as a waiter in New York a few years ago, whose parents are political refugees who found asylum in Denmark, settled in Texas and whose son went to the theater company one day in high school.

Then the rejection! While we were just preparing the house and the garden for a drink with Pedro, and organizing the fashion shoot - which is not easy under the current security precautions in LA -, his management called us with an unfortunate news: Pedro had - no, no Corona - to be operated due to an accident, and now in bed with a swelling face that does not allow any conversation or photo-session. 

A few days later he was standing in front of the door, puffy, still with threads in his mouth, not been brought by a limo service, but in his own car - and a make-up artist he also picked up at home and brought with him. He helps her bringing in her work utensils - what a gentleman - and lets you know first: “Now I have time today!” At first we didn't want to ask him about how he made it onto Hollywood's A-List, but he promopts us. 

Pedro Pascal: Sorry that I messed up your plans. The operation was an absolute emergency.

GQ: Really? We wondered if the swelling wasn't the result of a secret visit to the cosmetic surgeon. They should currently not be able to save themselves from orders due to the quarantine in Hollywood.

I have to disappoint you there. I sped to the hospital a few days before our appointment with a tooth fracture and the worst pain of my life - one where the severe corona cases end up. I couldn't reach a dentist! A specialist called me back shortly before the parking garage. I'll spare you the details of the operation, truly scary. Anyway, the pain was hellish, despite the ten injections. The doctor said that I was not an isolated incident, as people grind their teeth extremely from stress at night.

What are you most afraid of at the moment? 

How the government is dealing with the pandemic worries me even more than the virus itself. This lack of intelligent crisis management is a moral shame. The leadership crisis in the country makes us all orphans - penniless left to our own devices.

How have you spent the last few months? 

With frozen pizza in a jogging suit in Venice Beach. I live in a back building that is in a family's garden. There are actually plenty of good take-out restaurants nearby, but for some reason I like salami pizza from the supermarket.

That doesn't exactly sound like a movie star lifestyle. How does it feel when you are slowed down from top speed to zero? 

If you look at what else is going on in the world, you should keep your own sensitivities in check. I would have to lie if I pretended not to be disappointed. The whole team put an incredible amount of heart and soul into the production of “Wonder Woman 1984”. We had a lot of fun on set. I would have liked to travel the world with this feeling of liveliness, and present the film.

You come from a politically active, socialist family who fled Chile from the Pinochet regime. What do you remember back then? 

My sister and I were born in Chile, but I was only 9 months old when we first found asylum in Denmark. From there we moved to San Antonio, Texas, where my father worked as a doctor at the university clinic.

Texas isn't exactly known as a socialist utopia. How did you settle in there? 

San Antonio is not a cowboy city, but rather diverse, with large Asian, black and Latino communities. I remember it as a romantic place, culturally open. The culture shock didn't come until we later moved to Orange County, California. There the atmosphere was suddenly white, preppy and conservative.

How were you received in California? 

I am still ashamed now when I think about the fact that my classmates just called me Peter and I didn't correct that. I am Pedro. Even if I didn't grow up in Chile, the country and the language are part of me. I was pretty unhappy in this environment. But at least I was able to switch to another school near Long Beach where I felt more comfortable. I found my way through the school theater there.

Were you able to visit your family's home as a child? 

Yes, when my parents landed on a list of exiles who were allowed to return without consequences. First, there was a big family reunion, then my sister and I were stayed there with relatives for a few months while my parents went back to Texas. They probably needed a break from us. They got us pretty young, a lively social life, and my mother was doing a PhD in psychology.

Was your mother a typical young psychologist who wants to apply her theoretical knowledge at home?

You mean, was I a guinea pig? In any case. I still remember weird tests and sessions disguised as a game, where someone watched me react to different toys. Although I couldn't have been more than six, I was aware of the dynamic. I preferred to be asked about my dreams. It was always a wonderful opportunity to come up with fantastic stories. 

Was that your first performance?

Without doubt! My mother was troubled by my strong imagination, as I would rather live in my fantasy world than reality. I hated school. I ended up in the “problem child” drawer. At some point the topics got more interesting and my grades got better. So many children are unnecessarily diagnosed with learning disabilities without considering that class can be downright daunting. Why is it acceptable to be so bored in class when there are more stimulating ways to impart knowledge?

With all that is happening in the world this summer, do you think that we are now taking social change seriously enough? 

Hopefully. I went back to people for the first time after the lockdown to take the streets for “Black Lives Matter”. The energy was peaceful and hopeful until the police interfered and provoked serious rioting. After all, we cannot run away from the problems as we usually do and are less likely to distract ourselves. It seems as if the pressure of the pandemic has led to a new clarity: we do not want to continue like this.

The trailer for "Wonder Woman 1984" revives the optimism of the 80s. From today's perspective that is almost nostalgic.

Not without a reason. You're really happy for a full two hours. The director Patty Jenkins has made a film full of positive messages. We shot in Washington, DC, then in London and Spain - which sounds like I'm telling from a bygone era. 

Do you miss traveling?

It is only now becoming clear what a privilege it is to be able to pack your things and fly anywhere. With an American passport you could always move freely. And that is why it is actually unimaginable in what small radius our life now takes place. In the last few years I have often withdrawn between filming because I was so much on the go and overstimulated. Friends have already complained about how comfortable I have become. We all took social exchange for granted and are only now realizing how much we depend on human closeness. In the past few weeks I have often wistfully thought of all the party and dinner invitations that I canceled earlier.

In LA, you spend more time in private spaces or in nature than in other metropolises that are more oriented towards public life. Could this city be your retreat after New York?

My real home is my friends. I lead a nomadic life from an early age and have never taken deep roots anywhere. Until recently, the physical home was a place between arrival and departure and therefore not something I wanted to complicate with the accumulation of things. On the contrary: without having read Marie Kondo's book beforehand, I have freed myself of ballast in recent years and have already lived quite reduced.

Is there nothing that you collect or that you wouldn't say goodbye to?

Books! I even have the literature I read as a teenager and in college. The other day I came across a box of old theater manuscripts and materials from my studies at New York University. I can't easily part with art, just as I can't part with lamps or old photos. On the other hand, furniture and clothes are not a problem.

Do you remember roles that the costumes really defined?

Yes, “Game of Thrones” comes to mind primarily. During this time I first understood what it means to be supported by a look as an actor. I owe that to the costume designer Michele Clapton. For my role, she developed these very feminine robes and brocade coats, which looked dressed but manly and in which I felt sexy. And of course Lindy Hemming's power suits and Jan Sewell's bleached hairstyle for the tycoon villain Maxwell Lord in “Wonder Woman 1984” were also very important. In terms of style, I didn't see myself in this role at first, as the cuts and colors of the 80s don't necessarily suit my body. I'm seventies by type.

Do you take inspiration like this into your private wardrobe? 

In my spare time, a cool look is now being abandoned in favor of comfort. Occasionally, I feel sorry for the times when I expressed myself through a certain style. Hard to imagine that I went to raves as a teenager in the 90s; a real club kid with insane outfits: overalls, parachute pants, soccer jerseys and a top hat, as in the children's book "The Cat In The Hat" by Dr. Seuss. Later in New York I was out and about with a clique in which it was very important to have a certain style. The fact that I am now only out and about in jogging pants is not really possible!

Anyone who plays in comic book adaptations actually becomes a bodybuilder and eats ten steamed chicken breasts a day. How about you?

My body wouldn't go along with that. I find it hard enough to keep in shape. From your mid-40s you have to be a lot more disciplined. Until the tooth incident, I worked in the garden with a trainer several times a week to get the quarantine body under control. 

Apart from this coach, is there any steady relationship in your life?

I am not that far yet. Maybe someday, but until then, I'll show mercy. Unfortunately, I don't even have absurd corona dating stories to offer.

What would get on your nerves the most if you had yourself as a roommate?

I can be pretty decisive. I have to scrape together all of my humanity so as not to push through my film selection every evening. If I want something, I don't approach it from behind or passively-aggressively, but in frontal mode. I also tend to tunnel vision: if I feel bad, I cannot imagine that it will eventually get better. I find it difficult to put emotions into perspective or to cast off problems. Method acting really wouldn't be for me at all. And that's why I try to only work on projects that feel good, where you support and encourage each other.

Before trying on clothes [for the photoshoot], you spoke of a lack of self-esteem. How does that go with a career like yours?

Isn't it interesting how these properties and conditions are related? Self-worth comes from within, but it is also influenced by what society values, as we often adopt critical views from outside. I lived in New York for 20 years, studied there and then, until my mid-30s, earned my living as a waiter because I couldn't keep my head above water with theater and occasional film roles. Again and again it almost worked. The disappointment of repeatedly missing a perfect role or opportunity can be weary. When should you give up and what would plan B be? These questions arise not only for most actors, but also for many others,who struggle to survive professionally - no matter how much potential they have or how close the tip seems to be within reach. We are just realizing how much our narrow definition of success is destroying society. At the same time, we also become aware that origin and skin color still determine the likelihood of being able to lead a dignified existence.

What are the positive aspects of relatively late success as a leading man?

I have the feeling that I can shape my life myself - without being under pressure of accepting projects or having to develop a certain identity on social media. That certainly has to do with the fact that I am a man. Sadly, it’s different for women, and needs to change that - regardless of age -, they have been constrained by social conventions where they either expected to play a predefined character, or go through even more struggles to get their talent and skills recognized. 

Life is always a risk management, but even more so than usual. What would you be ready to lose?

Ximena Riquelme

16 NOV 2017 12:53 PM

Before being the protagonist of Narcos or filming with Colin Firth, José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal (42) was a child whom I knew very well because we are from the same family. A man who today looks with nostalgia and some perplexity at his place of origin and his history and who still does not answer what would have happened if he had stayed here.

The first memory I have of Pedro is in the arms of my mother during his baptism, in the garden of my house. She was a weeping bus and had huge black eyes. I was 9 years old. It was cloudy. Years later I learned that the priest was Gerardo Whelan, the legendary rector of Saint George's College. Pedro's parents were not at his baptism: my uncle, José Balmaceda, my mother's only male brother, and his wife Verónica Pascal were asylees at the Venezuelan embassy, which was on Bustos street, near my house. Pepe, as we used to say to my uncle, who years later would become a famous gynecologist, an expert in fertilization, was then a 27-year-old young doctor, in those days wanted by Dina. Some time before they had hidden Andrés Pascal Allende, Mirista and his wife's uncle. One day they came to take him to the José Joaquín Aguirre Hospital and he managed to escape by jumping through the roofs. It was October 1975.

Like most of the Chilean families, there were supporters of both sides in mine: for and against Pinochet. Trying to help Pedro's parents, my dad called a relative who held a high position in the Army. "Tell the children to get asylum, because I cannot guarantee their lives or that nothing happens to Veronica," was his reply. She was 22 years old. Then began the journey of my uncles and with them that of my cousin José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal. Pepe and Verónica had to start living secretly in different houses. Pedro, who was only 6 months old at the time, and his 3-year-old sister Javiera were left in charge of my mother's older sister, "Aunt Juani."

The second memory I have of Pedro is when I accompanied my parents, who carried him and his sister in their arms, to stand on the sidewalk in front of the Venezuelan embassy so that their parents could see them through the window.

My uncles left the Venezuelan embassy for the airport in January 1976, Pedro was 9 months old and obviously does not remember anything. I just remember that they didn't let me go. Pedro could not record the image, which I could not see, of his grandfather Luis Pascal Vigil - a very prominent lawyer - singing the National Anthem on the balcony of Pudahuel. A memory that is not mine but that I adopted, for cute.

As the people of the International Red Cross advised our family on time, Pedro and his sister did not leave the embassy with their parents, but arrived directly at the airport: this allowed their passports not to be stamped with the "L" for " limited to circulate "that stamped on the exiles who left. Therefore, the years that Pedro and Javiera came could come to Chile without problems. And for that reason, the choclón of cousins, we were able to share long summers in Pucón and some winters in Santiago.

The Balmaceda Pascal first arrived in Aarhus, Denmark, in October 1976. A year later they left for San Antonio, Texas, where Pedro's father was able to continue improving himself thanks to a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Veronica earned a PhD in Child Psychology.

________________________________________

"But Denmark is invisible to me," Pedro writes me by email. A while ago I proposed to interview him at a distance to travel a little about his history, and here we are, in front of the computer, sharing memories. "It is invisible to me, like everything that happened before. Although once, after telling him about my childhood, a doctor told me that the temporary separation with my mother was trapped in the memory of my body and that I could remember it through the senses".

My cousin, far away

The third memory I have of Pedro is a summer in Pucón. It must have been in 1978. "Pepelo", as we said, was no longer a guagua but a restless, very blond boy, who was so impacted by poverty in Chile that when he went out on the street with his gringo accent, he asked any person: "Are you poor?" He took food out of the pantry and gave it away. With my cousins we rented a warm wooden house, colorful, with the door frames out of square. It was summers with trips to those black sand beaches that burned the feet and picnics in Caburgua with lamb on the stick. They took us to mass and Pedro sang very inspired.

"This is where the memories become more vivid, like dreams," he writes. "I remember so many details: my older cousins, children my age who were like family. The beach seemed endless. I also remember running down the hallways and stairs of Aunt Juani's house looking for Santa Claus at Christmas."

XR: What was it like leaving your parents in the United States?

PP: "I think the trauma was going back to the States, although I obviously wanted to be with my parents. But childhood in Chile, with the Balmaceda and Pascal, was a dream, a world where nothing was missing, pure adventure and love."

Now that he tells me that, I remember that image of Pedro hanging on the neck of our aunt Juani, crying in Pudahuel because she did not want to return. At that time going to the airport was a panorama: we were going en masse to leave him and his sister, who traveled in charge of the stewardesses.

In 1981 I went with my parents and my two sisters to see the Balmaceda Pascal in Texas. I remember an eternal road trip from Miami, I remember Pedro's house, in a middle-class neighborhood, comfortable, beautiful, lovingly arranged by his mother. I remember the tears of my mother and Pedro's mother when we said goodbye to return to Chile. We still didn't know when they could return. Although Pedro never fully returned.

In December 1983, Pepe and Verónica were able to enter Chile. The whole family was packed on the terrace of Pudahuel, waiting for them. I remember the Balmaceda Pascal walking from the stairs of the plane to the International Police. I remember them happy, triumphant. Pedro was 8 years old and chose to stay in my house, in love with my girl sister.

We all went to Quintero, to the house of our grandfather Pepe, a great smoker, tennis player, and fanatic fanatic who took us to the town cinema to see double Tora! Programs, Tora !, Tora! More Bridges on the River Kwai and other old movies. Surely Pedro had to see several. Since he was a boy he said he wanted to be a "director". He liked horror movies and was a big movie consumer, like his dad.

PP: "I remember going to the movies with the cousins and the grandfather to see anything with Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone. They leased me VHS movies to see alone and happy."

XR: You once recited Hamlet on the beach with Grandpa.

PP: "No, it was Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller. I was about 14 years old. I videotaped it and lost the fucking camera on the trip back to the United States."

After that summer, Pedro began to come more sporadically. He was already grown up, at school and then at university. They had moved to Newport Beach, California. His father was doing very well. But Pedro, not so much.

PP: "I think that the way the family supported me in Chile was the opposite of what I experienced in Newport Beach. I started well in California but at 13 years old, very involved in the cinema, reading plays, books, TV, TV, TV, obsessed with these things, I had the bad luck to find few like me. It was a world very attached to conservatism and its privileges where not fitting was punished. There was a group of shitty goats who were my friends the first year and became my terrors thereafter. I don't enjoy remembering that time, but there are deep connections from back then. Friends of my parents who are like parents until today."

Pedro's mom soon found a performance arts program at a high school in another district. A more inclusive school compared to Corona del Mar, the neighborhood where they lived in Newport.

PP: "My mom and my driver's license were my salvation. There I was able to unleash my appetite for movies and theater without limits."

As time went by Pedro became a fun, provocative teenager with character. He said he was "lazy", but he went to study Theater at NYU in 1993 and he loved it. I started to see it less. When he came to Chile he went out with his friends, I was already married and having children.

XR: Did you find that our way of life was very boring?

PP: "Bored, no. But overwhelming regarding life's permanent decisions. I didn't have the Catholic structure, and I felt there was no room for a young guy like me. Like suddenly, from one trip of mine to another, you had lives that included marriages and children, and pleasing the visits of the gringo cousin was no longer an option for all of you. I had to duel, because I was jealous of his inattention."

XR: Do you find us very conservative?

PP: "Yes, but it is a major contradiction for me. I come from the perspective that no one can decide how someone else should live their life. And well, in our family there are social rules that are very firm. I think that a person has the right to live his life conservatively or wildly as long as he does not negatively impact anyone or tries to embarrass others by his lifestyle. I don't touch these issues very much with our family for fear of hearing their perspective, but what I do know is that if I ever needed help I could ask any member of our family by the name of Balmaceda, and I would get it."

In 1995, Pedro's parents returned to Chile with their two youngest children, Nicolás and Lucas, who had been born in California. Javiera also came for a couple of years. Pedro stayed in the United States.

PP: "It was a very scary period. I grew up with my family in the United States and from one day to the next there was no home to return to. Suddenly the idea of the safe nest was gone. It was shocking because in previous years I took for granted the privileged life we had in California. I never thought that this could change as suddenly as happened to my parents when they became exiles. Everything felt fragile. Also, I knew that my parents' marriage was wrong and that the tension of those circumstances was hardly going to end. My mother's life felt in danger and the line between needing her, being there for her and finishing my studies and pursuing a career was a horrible conflict. I knew that my mom wanted me to continue doing mine, she never would have wanted me to sacrifice it."

XR: Did you really resent the failure of your parents' marriage?

PP: "For me it was the hardest time. I have not been able, and I do not know if someday I will be able to reconcile completely how my parents separated and the tragedy that came after that separation. The circumstances of my mother's death made it very hard for us to keep her memory of who she was. It hurts so much ... Sometimes I feel distressed and try to face it in the best possible way, because I know that my mother would not like me to do it in any other way."

Pedro lost his mother when he was 24 years old.

PP: "It's hard to say what I remember most about her. You met her, so it is easy for you to understand that she was the love of my life. I think of her every day. Since I don't pray, I can't say that I have a practice to feel her close, but I live for her even though she's gone, and that makes sense to me."

From Alexander to Pedro

XR: Do you believe that pain makes us stronger or does it seem like a horrible cliché?

PP: "I don't think it's a terrible cliche but a profound reality. In some way, losing the most important person in your life, discovering that something like this is possible and that what you fear most in life can happen is an identifiable and permanent moment. There is a before and after after his death. I think, yes, that old age would not have been for my mother, there would have been no footwear with her. Of course, no one wants to grow old, but others can handle it better. I would not have liked to see my mom struggling with it, but at the same time, I wish I had her every day still with me."

It may have been the summer of 2012. Pedro said to our aunt Juani: "I am 37 years old and I still can't get what I want. And it's the only thing I know how to do." It had been a long time since the death of his mother in the summer of 2000 that Pedro had changed his name. From Pedro Balmaceda to Pedro Pascal. He had been searching for years, years of casting where, by being called Pedro Balmaceda in the studios, they hoped to find a Latin or classic Mexican phenotype. He had only made minor appearances in some series.

XR: Although you did not regret it, you did wear Alexander at some point. Why?

PP: "That was a desperate period and directly related to having lost my mother. I was desperate to work, to fill my days with something more to suffer. To eliminate the confusion that casting directors had with this guy named Pedro with European or Caucasian traits, I changed my first name to Alexander and took my mom's last name, Pascal. That only lasted a year, until I was able to find a job and be selected for an Ibsen theatrical classic. But it was too late for people to identify me as "Alex". Also, my mom named me Pedro. So the decision was to call me Pedro Pascal, a name that fits with me more than any other."

Soon after that came Brothers and Sisters, other small roles, and later more important ones in The Good Wife, The Law and Order, The Mentalist, until Game of Thrones, Narcos in 2015 and now, filming Muralla china with Matt Damon and William Dafoe - last year we all went to see his cousins together - and then Kingsman 2 with Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges, Halle Berry and Channing Tatum.

XR : Have you ever been excited acting with such powerful actors?

PP: "I have been thrilled with everyone."

With fame have come the new meetings of the cousins with Pedro Pascal. We all want to see him, take pictures of us, we ask him for greetings-chub for friends, we inflate ourselves by saying that he is our cousin. That Peña, the protagonist of Narcos and the sexiest guy in the world, is my cousin-brother. He laughs and humorously calls us "scoundrels" because now we remember him. In fact, that's what our cousin chat on Whastapp is called.

But there is also the modesty to disturb him. Know that you are busy. That while I'm sending you these questions, you're filming in Boston with Denzel Washington. And to feel that there is always a lack of time to speak to him calmly, a space to ask him questions like the ones that occur to me now:

XR: Exile changed your life. Can you imagine growing up in Chile?

PP: "I don't know, because I haven't thought much about it. I have been asked this question all my life and have never been able to come up with an answer. Perhaps my life would have been more complete and solid. What I am used to is that the past disappears as if it had been lived by someone else, in another time."

XR: Do you miss something from when you were Pedro Balmaceda?

PP: "You know? There is very little difference between Pedro Balmaceda and Pedro Pascal. As it is all part of José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal, I feel the same person. But with back problems and more money."

XR: Would you like to start a family?

PP: "Being a dad? I don't know. I have no fucking idea. I love being an uncle. It may just end there. But anything is possible."

XR: Marialy Rivas said something very nice about you on Saturday: that when you play a character, you pretend that this character brought a whole previous story, much bigger than what they are telling. And it's true: you carry a bigger story than you tell it.

PP: "I don't know, cousin. I am very confused trying to organize the past and see what turns out. It helps me understand the pain or be grateful for what I have. Sometimes I feel like I'm a fraud, living between waiting for fame and attention and completely embarrassed by these wishes.

In reference to what Marialy said, I think she means that I put all my confusion, joy and sorrow, ambivalence, hostility, rage, love, lust, greed, compassion, ignorance, knowledge either to indicate a map with the finger on Narcos, throwing an arrow in Game of Thrones, lashing out at Kingsman. Cool! But I think my experience in theater taught me that."

XR: Would you someday like your life to be a script?

PP: "No way." (in english)

XR: Do you still want to be a "director", as you used to say when you were a kid?

PP: "Yes! That will be my way of being a father. Father of a production."

XR: Is dreaming about an Oscar the dream of every actor, even if you don't confess it?

PP: "I confess that possibly… yes."

By Chancellor Agard • Photographer: Radka Leitmeritz Related: photoshoot / list of articles 

Human connection. It’s vital. Especially in a year like 2020. Especially for Pedro Pascal. So it’s ironic that the 45-year-old’s highest-profile success to date is working with an adorable animatronic puppet, inside a chrome helmet he famously can’t take off. "It is why I wanted to do this show. Selfishly, I knew [the Child, a.k.a. Baby Yoda] was likely to make people fall in love with the show," says Pascal of tackling the title role on The Mandalorian, the Emmy-nominated hit Star Wars series, which returned for its second season on Disney+ in October.

The Chilean-American actor has an eye for choosing projects where he’ll stand out, from popular network procedurals including The Good Wife, The Mentalist, and Law & Order to his breakout roles as the charming — and horny — Oberyn Martell on Game of Thrones and, soon after, DEA agent Javier Peña on Net­flix’s Narcos. But it’s the stoic bounty hunter safeguarding a frog-egg-eating 50-year-old toddler that’s made him a house­hold name. The new season of The Mandalorian followed Pascal’s galaxy-traveling warrior as he searched for the home of the Child, generating countless memes in the process.

Playing the Mandalorian has been one of the hardest and most unique experiences of Pascal's career to date. At this point, it's no secret that he wasn't physically under the helmet as much as he would've liked in season 1 and recorded his dialogue in post-production to match what his doubles, stunt actors Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder, did on set in the armor. Giving a largely vocal performance was a challenge for a physical actor like Pascal, who is almost unrecognizable when you compare his turns on The Good Wife and Game of Thrones, for example, because of how he carries himself. Yet, being on set way more in The Mandalorian season 2 didn't make his job any easier because he still had to figure how to make Mando compelling while also being as economical as possible in his physical movements and vocal performance.

"I'm not even sure if I would be able to do it if it weren't for the amount of direct experience that I've had with being on stage to understand how to posture yourself, how to physically frame yourself into something and to tell a story with a gesture, with a stance, or with very, very specific vocal intonation," says Pascal, who believes his collaborative relationship with creator Jon Favreau and executive producer Dave Filoni, a.k.a. his "Mandalorian papas," also helped him inhabit the role in season 2. 

Speaking of collaboration: Working with comedian Amy Sedaris, who plays gruff Tatooine mechanic Peli Motto, was one of the highlights of The Mandalorian’s sophomore season. “I followed Amy Sedaris around like a puppy. [I was] like, ‘Hey again. I’m not leaving your side until you wrap,’ and she’s like, ‘Cool,’” Pascal says. “I love the Child — it really is adorable — and it is so fascinating to see it work, but somebody who makes you spit-laugh right into your helmet will always be my favorite thing."

Pascal longed for those kinds of interactions during quarantine, which proved difficult for the actor who was living alone in Los Angeles. But he lights up, is even giddy at times, when the conversation turns to bonding with the Community cast right before a charity table read back in May (he filled in for Walton Goggins), or FaceTiming his friends to celebrate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' election victory on Nov. 7. "Ahhhh! Ahhhh!" Pascal exclaims, reenacting the joyous calls with buddies like Oscar Isaac that Saturday morning. "It was screaming and jumping and dancing and crying…. I very arrogantly took screenshots of everything and [shared them], like, 'I am a part of this!'"

"I'd be less nervous playing tennis in front of the Obamas than I was seeing a reunion of these people that I think are brilliant and have this incredible chemistry with each other and stepping in and having really, really, bad technology in this new space that I had moved into. I really resented having to actually participate acting-wise because there were instances where it was way too much fun to watch."

His appreciation for those around him has only grown during the pandemic. Before flying to Budapest to film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent with Nicholas Cage, Pascal leaned on his bubble for support. Community's Gillian Jacobs, for example, hosted him for an outdoor socially distanced pizza night every Saturday in the early weeks of lockdown. (He suspects that's why he was recruited for the sitcom's table read when Goggins couldn't participate.) 

"The friends that got me through it are absolutely everything to me and very beautifully marked in my head. I've got old friends and new friends that literally did nothing short of parent me through the experience," says Pascal, who has "survivor's remorse" for being in Europe right now. "I feel guilty not being [in the States] with my friends through [this tumultuous time] but also grateful that, individually, I was able to gain a little bit of separation from the stress of it."

Those tight bonds helped redefine, or at least clarify, what success means to him. "I want to make sure that my relationships are right, and I want to make sure I'm nurturing meaning in a sustaining way, and that won't necessarily be related to getting good jobs and making lots of money," he says. But he'll take them — as he did for both of his 2020 projects, about which he's thrilled. And how could he not be, starring in two of the year's most feverishly anticipated properties?

Besides The Mandalorian, Pascal appears in Patty Jenkins' superhero epic Wonder Woman 1984, which has endured a Homeric journey to its release (read: several pandemic-related delays). Thankfully, the odyssey is almost over because Warner Bros. recently confirmed that it will open in both theaters and on HBO Max on Dec. 25. Pascal is stoked audiences will finally see his turn as the villainous Maxwell Lord because playing the greedy dream-seller pushed him out of his post-Game of Thrones action role comfort zone.

"With Wonder Woman, [Gal Gadot and Kristen Wiig] are doing the action, baby, and I'm doing the schm-acting!" he says, hilariously elongating that final syllable. "I am hamming it up!" (Indeed, Pascal reveals Cage inspired his performance in one particular scene.)

But Pascal felt he was up to the challenge because everything he needed was right there in the screenplay, which Jenkins co-wrote with Geoff Johns and David Callaham. "I didn't have to take something and figure out how to put more flesh onto it. I had to achieve getting into the skin of what was being presented to me," he says, contrasting the experience with playing a DEA agent for three seasons on Narcos. "For me, Colombia was almost the central character, and then I was allowed to make him depressive and to tonally interpret what the character was. And in this case [on Wonder Woman 1984], there was just so much for me to meet rather than to invent."

By Juan Sanguino • Photographer: Danielle-Degrasse-Alston • Stylist: Warren Alfie Baker Related: photoshoot / list of articles / en Español

The first big opportunity in his career was presented in 2011, when he participated in a pilot episode of Wonder Woman for NBC, but the network discarded the series and Pedro Pascal returned to his main occupation: to play the criminal of the week in Law and Order. “That cancellation was a disappointment, of course, I wanted to work. I did not care if it was something good or bad, I just wanted to work," he recalls today from his Los Angeles home during a virtual conversation with ICON. Now Pascal plays the villain of Wonder Woman 1984, one of the blockbusters destined to return audiences to movie theaters. 

How can you not believe in fate? The boy who broke his arm twice playing Indiana Jones has ended up becoming the favorite hero of kids, as the bounty hunter in The Mandalorian, his parents, as Agent Peña in Narcos, and, well, everyone's as Oberyn Martell, The Red Viper in Game of Thrones. When Pedro was little, the good guys were always white and the bad guys were Russian, Arab or Latino. The Wonder Woman 1984 villain, however, is a white billionaire played by a Chilean.

“The film is set in the United States in the eighties, which were marked by capitalism and greed. It was a tainted concept of evil. Stripped of humanity, but still absolutely attractive and alluring. People who dreamed of being rich and successful had to be salivated. It is true that at that time villains in the cinema projected a xenophobic image. Now, the white man finally can be the  bad guy.”

Some already compare his character, Maxwell Lord, to Donald Trump because of that muck in this mud: Reagan's glorification of rogue moguls in America turned guys like Trump into aspirational “role models” and “glamorous stars”. 

“Trump was not the core of inspiration for my character. Our costume designer's vision based on Gordon Gekko from Wall Street, American Psycho's Patrick Bateman and other suckers in expensive eighties suits. All those millionaires who hid despair, unbridled ambition and terrifying masculinity.”

If Pedro Pascal sounds like a socialist infiltrated in Hollywood it is because that is exactly what he is.

“When Reagan was elected, many people around me were frustrated that the worst forms of capitalism was winning. In my home, with refugee and socialist parents, conservatism was not demonized, but it did go against what was important to my family.” 

Pascal's father, José Balmaceda, was an Allende supporter doctor who saved the life of a priest wounded by Pinochet's militia. The priest was later tortured and ended up confessing the name of his savior. When the police went to look for Balmaceda at the hospital where he worked, he took his wife and the newborn Pedro, jumped over the wall of the Venezuelan embassy in Santiago de Chile to request political asylum. Pedro ended up growing up in San Antonio, Texas, in a socialist home, but in Reagan's land. A Chilean with no memories of Chile who was called Peter in high school.

Pascal has never left the immigrant mentality behind. Even his father, who opened his practice in California, always lived in terror that at any moment everything could vanish. 

“It doesn't matter who you are, how much you are working or how much you get paid. Deep down you always think that each job is the last one.“

Maybe that's why he didn't dare to move from his Red Hook, Brooklyn, hovel to a home more suitable for a Hollywood star until filming for Kingsman 2 and Narcos was over. Nor that he had spent more than a full week at his house since Game of Thrones made him the guy most people want to party with. 

Pascal knew right away that Oberyn Martell, the “Westeros’ rockstar” who always seemed ready to fight or fornicate with the same bravado, was going to change his life. 

“I had done a lot of castings for friends' plays, for copy factory ads or for very serious independent films that no one was going to see, while I watched how many characters that I had been about to play changed the lives of other actors. And thanks to my experience and maturity, I recognized the potential of Oberyn. I understood who he was and who he could be.”

The actor found out about the audition when one of his acting students told him that he had auditioned but had been discarded because of his youth. Pedro snapped up and must have thought, "What would Oberyn do?" So he recorded a video on his phone and sent it to his good friend, actress Sarah Paulson, who passed it on to her good friend actress Amanda Peet, who then showed it to her husband, David Benioff, one of the creators of Game of Thrones. The rest is history of television and headaches: when he was informed by the Narcos producer he was chosen to play Pablo Escobar's pursuing policeman, he accused him of making a spoiler for Game of Thrones: if Pascal had a free agenda, it is because Oberyn was going to lose his fight against The Mountain. Of course, he couldn't imagine how.

Part of that electric, lively and hedonistic energy of Oberyn comes from Pascal’s summer of 1996 he spent in Madrid, where in addition to studying, he also worked as a go-go dancer in a disco. That stay was transformative, because the actor realized: throughout his life he had had to adapt his identity with each new move, but in Madrid he felt effortlessly at home. 

“I was 20 years old and I liked it so much that I almost moved. My main language is English, I have an American accent and I can pass for white. But in my house there were many cultural differences with respect to the outside world and I remember that when I was 20 years old, and arrived in Madrid, I felt very comfortable in my own skin in a way, that I had never felt anywhere else. I guess, I was not aware that I had spent my childhood and adolescence learning new ways of adapting, connecting, and learning. On the contrary, living in Madrid was organic and easy for me. I made friends right away and I felt supported.”

By the time he was 40, Pascal was already resigned to being an actor with enough odd jobs to pay the rent. According to him, his aquiline nose was a bad feature by Hollywood standards. Far from being offended or frustrated by this typecasting, he was always looking forward to it, if it translated into a new check. 

“It is very strange to develop a fantasy as a child, to have the opportunity to turn it into a hobby, then to study and finally transform all that into a career. That is the bet. But my dream of becoming the next Leonardo DiCaprio died.”

 He died dozens and dozens of times. So to move on, he had to accept that, at best, he was going to be an actor with a job. That was already a triumph. 

“In addition, I accepted I was not qualified for anything else, I had no more skills: I had to put all my time, my energy and my concentration in being an actor and the rest in living life and having fun."

That absence of vanity lives on today, even when he's been involved in large-scale projects for five years without stopping. After Game of Thrones, he has made eight films, of which seven are action blockbusters. The wave of fame came to him when he no longer expected it but when he was well prepared to ride it. Still, every workday is a surprise and he acknowledges that what amazes him most about Hollywood is the sheer physical stamina that people have. 

“Sometimes a project can look like building a city: with all the hours, all the work and energy it requires. Some people have better stamina and can get by with little sleep. That is an interesting contradiction: all the people creatively involved in a film have a special sensitivity and at the same time they have developed a very tough skin and energy to go through the physical experience of shooting it.”

Then Pascal switches to Spanish (the language he uses to confess intimacies) and explains, in a nutshell, that he is old for this shit. 

“I thought I had all the energy in the world, and now, in my 40s, I see that ... wow! There are times when I don't know if I will be able to reach the goal, because my energy is not at the necessary level. But I always take it forward.” 

Maybe that's why people get so high in Hollywood. Pascal responds between laughter and again in Spanish.

“I already took all my drugs very early. It is something that is already too much in the past, and in middle age a hangover is not an option. No, no, no.” 

What if the other hangover, the wave of fame, runs over you? 

By Adam B. Vary • Styling: Sean Knight • Grooming: Mira Chai Hyde  Related: photoshoot / list of articles 

When Pedro Pascal was roughly 4 years old, he and his family went to see the 1978 hit movie “Superman,” starring Christopher Reeve. Pascal’s young parents had come to live in San Antonio after fleeing their native Chile during the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet in the mid-1970s. Taking Pascal and his older sister to the movies — sometimes more than once a week — had become a kind of family ritual, a way to soak up as much American pop culture as possible. At some point during this particular visit, Pascal needed to go to the bathroom, and his parents let him go by himself. “I didn’t really know how to read yet,” Pascal says with the same Cheshire grin that dazzled “Game of Thrones” fans during his run as the wily (and doomed) Oberyn Martel. “I did not find my way back to ‘Superman.'”

Instead, Pascal wandered into a different theater (he thinks it was showing the 1979 domestic drama “Kramer vs. Kramer,” but, again, he was 4). In his shock and bewilderment at being lost, he curled up into an open seat and fell asleep. When he woke up, the movie was over, the theater was empty, and his parents were standing over him. To his surprise, they seemed rather calm, but another detail sticks out even more. “I know that they finished their movie,” he says, bending over in laughter. “My sister was trying to get a rise out of me by telling me, ‘This happened and that happened and then Superman did this and then, you know, the earthquake and spinning around the planet.'” In the face of such relentless sibling mockery, Pascal did the only logical thing: “I said, ‘All that happened in my movie too.'” He had no way of knowing it at the time, of course, but some 40 years later, Pascal would in fact get the chance to star in a movie alongside a DC Comics superhero — not to mention battle Stormtroopers and, er, face off against the most formidable warrior in Westeros. After his breakout on “Game of Thrones,” he became an instant get-me-that-guy sensation, mostly as headstrong, taciturn men of action — from chasing drug traffickers in Colombia for three seasons on Netflix’s “Narcos” to squaring off against Denzel Washington in The Equalizer 2.

This year, though, Pascal finds himself poised for the kind of marquee career he’s spent a lifetime dreaming about. On Oct. 30, he’ll return for Season 2 as the title star of “The Mandalorian,” Lucasfilm’s light-speed hit “Star Wars” series for Disney Plus that earned 15 Emmy nominations, including best drama, in its first season. And then on Dec. 25 — COVID-19 depending — he’ll play the slippery comic book villain Maxwell Lord opposite Gal Gadot, Chris Pine and Kristen Wiig in “Wonder Woman 1984.”

The roles are at once wildly divergent and the best showcase yet for Pascal’s elastic talents. In “The Mandalorian,” he must hide his face — and, in some episodes, his whole body — in a performance that pushes minimalism and restraint to an almost ascetic ideal. In “Wonder Woman 1984,” by stark contrast, he is delivering the kind of big, broad bad-guy character that populated the 1980s popcorn spectaculars of his youth.

“I continually am so surprised when everybody pegs him as such a serious guy,” says “Wonder Woman 1984” director Patty Jenkins. “I have to say, Pedro is one of the most appealing people I have known. He instantly becomes someone that everybody invites over and you want to have around and you want to talk to.”

Talk with Pascal for just five minutes — even when he’s stuck in his car because he ran out of time running errands before his flight to make it to the set of a Nicolas Cage movie in Budapest — and you get an immediate sense of what Jenkins is talking about. Before our interview really starts, Pascal points out, via Zoom, that my dog is licking his nether regions in the background. “Don’t stop him!” he says with an almost naughty reproach. “Let him live his life!”

Over our three such conversations, it’s also clear that Pascal’s great good humor and charm have been at once ballast for a number of striking hardships, and a bulwark that makes his hard-won success a challenge for him to fully accept.

Before Pascal knew anything about “The Mandalorian,” its showrunner and executive producer Jon Favreau knew he wanted Pascal to star in it.

“He feels very much like a classic movie star in his charm and his delivery,” says Favreau. “And he’s somebody who takes his craft very seriously.” Favreau felt Pascal had the presence and skill essential to deliver a character — named Din Djarin, but mostly called Mando — who spends virtually every second of his time on screen wearing a helmet, part of the sacrosanct creed of the Mandalorian order.

Convincing any actor to hide their face for the run of a series can be as precarious as escaping a Sarlacc pit. To win Pascal over in their initial meeting, Favreau brought him behind the “Mandalorian” curtain, into a conference room papered with storyboards covering the arc of the first season. “When he walked in, it must have felt a little surreal,” Favreau says. “You know, most of your experiences as an actor, people are kicking the tires to see if it’s a good fit. But in this case, everything was locked and loaded.”

Needless to say, it worked. “I hope this doesn’t sound like me fashioning myself like I’m, you know, so smart, but I agreed to do this [show] because the impression I had when I had my first meeting was that this is the next big s—,” Pascal says with a laugh.

Favreau’s determination to cast Pascal, however, put the actor in a tricky situation: Pascal’s own commitments to make “Wonder Woman 1984” in London and to perform in a Broadway run of “King Lear” with Glenda Jackson barreled right into the production schedule for “The Mandalorian.” Some scenes on the show, and in at least one case a full episode, would need to lean on the anonymity of the title character more than anyone had quite planned, with two stunt performers — Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder — playing Mando on set and Pascal dubbing in the dialogue months later.

Pascal was already being asked to smother one of his best tools as an actor, extraordinarily uncommon for anyone shouldering the newest iteration of a global live-action franchise. (Imagine Robert Downey Jr. only playing Iron Man while wearing a mask — you can’t!) Now he had to hand over control of Mando’s body to other performers too. Some actors would have walked away. Pascal didn’t.

“If there were more than just a couple of pages of a one-on-one scene, I did feel uneasy about not, in some instances, being able to totally author that,” he says. “But it was so easy in such a sort of practical and unexciting way for it to be up to them. When you’re dealing with a franchise as large as this, you are such a passenger to however they’re going to carve it out. It’s just so specific. It’s ‘Star Wars.'” (For Season 2, Pascal says he was on the set far more, though he still sat out many of Mando’s stunts.)

“The Mandalorian” was indeed the next big s—, helping to catapult the launch of Disney Plus to 26.5 million subscribers in its first six weeks. With the “Star Wars” movies frozen in carbonite until 2023 (at least), I noted offhand that he’s now effectively the face of one of the biggest pop-culture franchises in the world. Pascal could barely suppress rolling his eyes.

“I mean, come on, there isn’t a face!” he says with a laugh that feels maybe a little forced. “If you want to say, ‘You’re the silhouette’ — which is also a team effort — then, yeah.” He pauses. “Can we just cut the s— and talk about the Child?”

Yes, of course, the Child — or, as the rest of the galaxy calls it, Baby Yoda. Pascal first saw the incandescently cute creature during his download of “Mandalorian” storyboards in that initial meeting with Favreau. “Literally, my eyes following left to right, up and down, and, boom, Baby Yoda close to the end of the first episode,” he says. “That was when I was like, ‘Oh, yep, that’s a winner!'”

Baby Yoda is undeniably the breakout star of “The Mandalorian,” inspiring infinite memes and apocryphal basketball game sightings. But the show wouldn’t work if audiences weren’t invested in Mando’s evolving emotional connection to the wee scene stealer, something Favreau says Pascal understood from the jump. “He’s tracking the arc of that relationship,” says the showrunner. “His insight has made us rethink moments over the course of the show.” (As with all things “Star Wars,” questions about specifics are deflected in deference to the all-powerful Galactic Order of Spoilers.)

Even if Pascal couldn’t always be inside Mando’s body, he never left the character’s head, always aware of how this orphaned bounty hunter who caroms from planet to planet would look askance at anything that felt too good (or too adorable) to be true.

“The transience is something that I’m incredibly familiar with, you know?” Pascal says. “Understanding the opportunity for complexity under all of the armor was not hard for me.”

When Pascal was 4 months old, his parents had to leave him and his sister with their aunt, so they could go into hiding to avoid capture during Pinochet’s crackdown against his opposition. After six months, they finally managed to climb the walls of the Venezuelan embassy during a shift change and claim asylum; from there, the family relocated, first to Denmark, then to San Antonio, where Pascal’s father got a job as a physician.

Pascal was too young to remember any of this, and for a healthy stretch of his childhood, his complicated Chilean heritage sat in parallel to his life in the U.S. — separate tracks, equally important, never quite intersecting. By the time Pascal was 8, his family was able to take regular trips back to Chile to visit with his 34 first cousins. But he doesn’t remember really talking about any of his time there all that much with his American friends.

“I remember at one point not even realizing that my parents had accents until a friend was like, ‘Why does your mom talk like that?'” Pascal says. “And I remember thinking, like what?”

Besides, he loved his life in San Antonio. His father took him and his sister to Spurs basketball games during the week if their homework was done. He hoodwinked his mother into letting him see “Poltergeist” at the local multiplex. He watched just about anything on cable; the HBO special of Whoopi Goldberg’s one-woman Broadway show knocked him flat. He remembers seeing Henry Thomas in “E.T.” and Christian Bale in “Empire of the Sun” and wishing ardently, urgently, I want to live those stories too. 

Then his father got a job in Orange County, Calif. After Pascal finished the fifth grade, they moved there. It was a shock. “There were two really, really rough years,” he says. “A lot of bullying.”

His mother found him a nascent performing arts high school in the area, and Pascal burrowed even further into his obsessions, devouring any play or movie he could get his hands on. His senior year, a friend of his mother’s gave Pascal her ticket to a long two-part play running in downtown Los Angeles that her bad back couldn’t withstand. He got out of school early to drive there by himself. It was the pre-Broadway run of “Angels in America.”

“And it changed me,” he says with almost religious awe. “It changed me.”

After studying acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Pascal booked a succession of solid gigs, like MTV’s “Undressed” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But the sudden death of his mother — who’d only just been permitted to move back to Chile a few years earlier — took the wind right from Pascal’s sails. He lost his agent, and his career stalled almost completely.

As a tribute to her, he decided to change his professional last name from Balmaceda, his father’s, to Pascal, his mother’s. “And also, because Americans had such a hard time pronouncing Balmaceda,” he says. “It was exhausting.”

Pascal even tried swapping out Pedro for Alexander (an homage to Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander,” one of the formative films of his youth). “I was willing to do absolutely anything to work more,” he says. “And that meant if people felt confused by who they were looking at in the casting room because his first name was Pedro, then I’ll change that. It didn’t work.”

It was a desperately lean time for Pascal. He booked an occasional “Law & Order” episode, but mostly he was pounding the pavement along with his other New York theater friends — like Oscar Isaac, who met Pascal doing an Off Broadway play. They became fast, lifelong friends, bonding over their shared passions and frustrations as actors.

“It’s gotten better, but at that point, it was so easy to be pigeonholed in very specific roles because we’re Latinos,” says Isaac. “It’s like, how many gang member roles am I going to be sent?” As with so many actors, the dream Pascal and Isaac shared to live the stories of their childhoods had been stripped down to its most basic utility. “The dream was to be able to pay rent,” says Isaac. “There wasn’t a strategy. We were just struggling. It was talking about how to do this thing that we both love but seems kind of insurmountable.”

As with so few actors, that dream was finally rekindled through sheer nerve and the luck of who you know, when another lifelong friend, actor Sarah Paulson, agreed to pass along Pascal’s audition for Oberyn Martell to her best friend Amanda Peet, who is married to “Game of Thrones” co-showrunner David Benioff. 

“First of all, it was an iPhone selfie audition, which was unusual,” Benioff remembers over email. “And this wasn’t one of the new-fangled iPhones with the fancy cameras. It looked like s—; it was shot vertical; the whole thing was very amateurish. Except for the performance, which was intense and believable and just right.”

Before Pascal knew it, he found himself in Belfast, sitting inside the Great Hall of the Red Keep as one of the judges at Tyrion Lannister’s trial for the murder of King Joffrey. “I was between Charles Dance and Lena Headey, with a view of the entire f—ing set,” Pascal says, his eyes wide and astonished still at the memory. “I couldn’t believe I didn’t have an uncomfortable costume on. You know, I got to sit — and with this view.” He sighs. “It strangely aligned itself with the kind of thinking I was developing as a child that, at that point, I was convinced was not happening.”

And then it all started to happen. 

In early 2018, while Pascal was in Hawaii preparing to make the Netflix thriller “Triple Frontier” — opposite his old friend Isaac — he got a call from the film’s producer Charles Roven, who told him Patty Jenkins wanted to meet with him in London to discuss a role in another film Roven was producing, “Wonder Woman 1984.”

“It was a f—ing offer,” Pascal says in an incredulous whisper. “I wasn’t really grasping that Patty wanted to talk to me about a part that I was going to play, not a part that I needed to get. I wasn’t able to totally accept that.”

Pascal had actually shot a TV pilot with Jenkins that wasn’t picked up, made right before his life-changing run on “Game of Thrones” aired. “I got to work with Patty for three days or something and then thought I’d never see her again,” he says. “I didn’t even know she remembered me from that.”

She did. “I worked with him, so I knew him,” she says. “I didn’t need him to prove anything for me. I just loved the idea of him, and I thought he would be kind of unexpected, because he doesn’t scream ‘villain.'”

In Jenkins’ vision, Max Lord — a longstanding DC Comics rogue who shares a particularly tangled history with Wonder Woman — is a slick, self-styled tycoon with a knack for manipulation and an undercurrent of genuine pathos. It was the kind of larger-than-life character Pascal had never been asked to tackle before, so he did something equally unorthodox: He transformed his script into a kind of pop-art scrapbook, filled with blown-up photocopies of Max Lord from the comic books that Pascal then manipulated through his lens on the character.

Even the few pages Pascal flashes to me over Zoom are quite revealing. One, featuring Max sporting a power suit and a smarmy grin, has several burned-out holes, including through the character’s eye. Another page features Max surrounded by text bubbles into which Pascal has written, over and over and over again in itty-bitty lettering, “You are a f—ing piece of s—.”

“I felt like I had wake myself up again in a big way,” he says. “This was just a practical way of, like, instead of going home tired and putting Netflix on, [I would] actually deal with this physical thing, doodle and think about it and run it.”

Jenkins is so bullish on Pascal’s performance that she thinks it could explode his career in the same way her 2003 film “Monster” forever changed how the industry saw Charlize Theron. “I would never cast him as just the stoic, quiet guy,” Jenkins says. “I almost think he’s unrecognizable from ‘Narcos’ to ‘Wonder Woman.’ Wouldn’t even know that was the same guy. But I think that may change.”

When people can see “Wonder Woman 1984” remains caught in the chaos the pandemic has wreaked on the industry; both Pascal and Jenkins are hopeful the Dec. 25 release date will stick, but neither is terribly sure it will. Perhaps it’s because of that uncertainty, perhaps it’s because he’s spent his life on the outside of a dream he’s now suddenly living, but Pascal does not share Jenkins’ optimism that his experience making “Wonder Woman 1984” will open doors to more opportunities like it.

“It will never happen again,” Pascal says, once more in that incredulous whisper. “It felt so special.”

After all he’s done in a few short years, why wouldn’t Pascal think more roles like this are on his horizon?

“I don’t know!” he finally says with a playful — and pointed — howl. “I’m protecting myself psychologically! It’s just all too good to be true! How dare I!” 

Interviewer: Igor Ramírez-García Peralta • Photographer: Stefan Ruiz Related: photoshoot / list of articles / en español 🇪🇸 

Pedro Pascal belongs to a refreshing type of Hollywood stars, who is well educated while remains unpretentious and free from any level of insufferable diva attitude. He understands very well going against his nature will drift him away from his goals. Success came relatively late, at 38, with his breakthrough role by polysexual Oberyn Martell, in the fourth season of "Game of Thrones."

It is clear to me that Pedro is at his best. In the next few months there will be three premieres he’s been linked to: “The Great Wall”, directed by Zhang Yimou, in which he shares credits with Matt Damon and Willem Dafoe; the Kingsman sequel, co-starring Julianne Moore, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Jeff Bridges and Colin Firth; and finally, the highly anticipated third season of Narcos, the series in which he plays agent Javier Peña, which has given him the same number of fans, at least, as the character of Martell. 

Between his overseas filming, photo sessions and visiting his family in Chile, a mutual friend put us in touch. One of the countless voice messages that we exchanged to coordinate the interview, breakfast, photo shoot, dinner and drink contest between Colombia, London and Manhattan he said: “Welcome to ... [dramatic pause] Colombia”. I arrived at the Narcos set in downtown Bogotá on Thanksgiving Day. His two American colleagues (Eric Lange and Brett Cullen) were desperate with the elasticity of the South American minutes in a day that seemed to have no end, while a DEA agent - a real one - was waiting for them at home with a lot of turkey, whiskey, American football - a good portion of testosterone. Meanwhile, Lucas - Pedro's younger brother, who will have a small role in the next installment of the series - and I amused ourselves by breaking the mythical folding chairs with the protagonists’ name of the series. 

Interviewing and photographing Pedro has been a luxury that rarely occurs in journalism. A process of months, but continuous, in different contexts and in stages that has allowed me to know him much more than I can normally know who we put onto our covers. At the whims of fate, in addition to Lucas, I also met his sister, in Miami, and it turns out that Francisco Celhay, the other Chilean actor we include in this issue, is his first cousin. From what escapes from the talk that we transcribe below, I can add that Pedro does not have any food allergies, but that, since he was 20 years old, he knows that he is allergic to cocaine; that his animal spirit is Tigger, the companion of Winnie the Pooh; that he claims not to be handsome — someone told him that he looked like Orlando Bloom after being slapped in the face — and that, from time to time, he remembers a dog, with a bitten ear, that usually visits the set in Cali, and stands outside his trailer. Pedro: we beg you, adopt it.

Narcos adds salt to wounds that are still very open in Colombia. The history of Escobar and the cartels of Medellín and Cali is very recent. How do you digest this and what has it meant for your role?

It is quite complex. On one hand, it is understood that Colombians are tired of the subject. I had already been in Colombia before coming to shoot Narcos. I know the country, its people, its land, its politics and culture far beyond that topic and I find it unfortunate that the rest of the world necessarily associates narco-culture with this country. We most of the times film on location, and every time someone comes up to ask what we are doing, the reaction to knowing that it is Narcos is always the same: disenchantment. However, I think it is interesting that a series like this, with a worldwide audience, shows its shaping power. Colombia has a very complex, beautiful, cinematic texture. People and culture are reflected in their land and we have managed to capture that visually; in fact, I think this is one of the central elements of the plot; sometimes even more important than dramatic and violent events. The locations where we film add dimension to the story and make it all seem so much more real. There are Mexicans, Spanish, and Brazilians playing Colombians, yet together we are able to represent the people who were involved directly, or unwillingly in the events, and understanding them allow us to tell much more than what the audience might expect. That is why, I think, we have been so successful, not only because of the sensationalism, violence, darkness and sexuality of the history of Colombian drug trafficking. 

Did you imagine that you would stay until season three?

Honestly, no. I knew I was going to participate in two seasons, regardless of the success of the first. They had a script for Escobar that lasted two seasons and my role, Agent Peña, was part of both. After the success of the first, I knew that the series was going to continue. After all, the plot was never intended to focus exclusively on Escobar, but also on the history, politics, and reality of drug trafficking. But what I didn't know, and I really didn't expect, was that I was going to be in the third season. Out of the characters around Escobar, I thought he would be the last person to be invited back.

Neiflix has changed the way television series are produced, distributed and consumed. What do you think about it?

It's amazing, the whole industry changed in five years. Okay, actually in one. They started with the success of House of Cards, which was not even the first series - it was another that nobody knows called Lilyhammer. The year that we started Narcos, they are going to do, I think, twelve original productions. Now I have lost count… And I confess that I am a victim of what they do, because I see everything. I know it sounds absurd but, compared to what is happening in the politics of the western world right now, where everything is so bleak, disappointing and alarmingly retrograde, television is progressing in terms of themes, culture, representation of diversity and the risks that are assumed with the stories that are narrated.

Do you prefer to work in cinema, television or theater?

For me, the ideal is to work in the three media, as all my colleagues do. I moved to New York when I was 18 to study, and I swear, I almost gave up trying to get roles in off-Broadway productions. My friends were actors who mainly did theater, but also television and cinema, some with more success than others, obviously, but in our community we understood that it was time to do everything. I think television is the most arduous medium because of schedules. A colleague who worked with Holly Hunter on her first television series, after a very successful career in film and theater, told me that she had said to him, "Television isn't for pussies". It is curious that she has affirmed that, after having split her back all her life working as an actress, but it is true. The hours are very intense, the days are endless ... In this sense, Narcos is a peculiar challenge, because, in a way, it is invented as we go along. It depends a lot on the locations - and these are unpredictable - but, at the same time, we have a script that must be respected. To summarize, I would say that I do not prefer a specific medium. Television is the heaviest; Theater is the most familiar experience for me, and cinema supposes, in a certain way, the dismantling of a children's fantasy, because it is truly the least glamorous experience you can have. At least in what I have had to live. You are in a 150 million dollar production, but sitting in the mud, in an absolute plague and surrounded by flies.

Do you own characteristics of your characters?

I've been acting for twenty years and I'm still not sure. It takes me a while to realize how a project or role could have affected me. It is true that, sometimes, I have dreamed things that confirmed to me that the paper had gotten too much inside. Other times I can't sleep or I'm in a bad mood, but I forget that I've been investigating very violent stories and playing dark scenes. And it's ridiculous, but instead of associating that with not being able to sleep, having a jaw tense and feeling uncomfortable, what I think is that maybe I am lactose intolerant or that I have an allergy and that I shouldn't have eaten that pizza… I'm already too used to this and it just feels like work. To be honest, I find it very difficult to understand the actors whose walls filled with photos and clippings, and do not stop talking about the research they have done to create their character. On the other hand, instinctively, I don't want to talk much about it. I have never felt comfortable talking about my character and his story. Obviously, I think about it, but I don't talk much, I don't know whether to preserve a method that works for me or simply because I'm fucking lazy. 

You work a lot in locations: China, Colombia, Croatia ... And for very long seasons. What about your private life?

What about my private life? Simple answer: I do not have. My life is work and tourism. It is strange to have this type of adventure being an adult. As a child I fantasized about working in the cinema and after surviving the inevitable broken heart that comes with maturity, being alive and, above all, wanting to be an actor, it is still ironic and funny to achieve your childhood dream at 40. You miss your house, your bed, your friends, your comforts and the routine, but it is interesting that all that is interrupted, and more at this age, because I think I can absorb the experience with much more perspective and maturity.

How was your experience in China filming The Great Wall?

I loved it. I had never set foot in China until I stood there for five months to work with one of my favorite directors [Zhang Yimou], whom I never even imagined crossing paths with. And next to fucking Matt Damon and Willem Dafoe! Matt, frankly, is one of the best people I've ever met; Not from the best famous people I've ever met, but from the best people and that's it. He was there with his family, with his wife - who is even better than him - and his children. On the other hand, I have seen all the Dafoe films since I was a child, so it was a privilege that they served me on a silver platter, although, at the same time, very hard work, because it is a complicated film, also shot in locations.

And in London, for the Kingsman sequel?

I had already been to London many times, but always on short trips, and suddenly, I had to stay four months. I had always fantasized about living there, and it exceeded all my expectations. I was there when the Brexit referendum was voted and the atmosphere in the city changed from one day to the next. It was scary and sad. It broke my heart to see so many people in shock, without understanding a result that no one could have predicted. Even with this, I was able to immerse myself, as an outsider, in the culture of a city that for me is extremely progressive and multicultural, inclusive and wild; a little dark but friendly. 

The concept of the previous issue of Solar was "Respect your idols!", A kind of vote in favor of not losing emotion when meeting them and remembering what they have meant to you; Don't let the fan die inside of you, regardless of how close your childhood idols can become as you enter the industry. How has this been for you?

It's funny that you ask, because I'm still a big fan. I think this characterizes me as much as my work. In addition to being an actor, I am a spectator. I associate it with being a Chilean immigrant in the United States, with how young my parents were and how unstable their life was when I was born and how pop-culture, film and cable television socialized us and, in a way, they educated my sister and me. Later it turned out that a fantasy became a hobby that, in turn, became my profession. Come on, I do not hide being a fan. Kingsman was a particularly interesting experience, because it was a fucking circus with fabulous movie stars: Halle Berry, Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, Colin Firth, Channing Tatum and Taron Egerton, who, despite being new to the industry, is a fucking love. It's all a bit overwhelming and scary, but I think the little fan inside me is so dominant that I managed to overcome the fear of working with them. I have to say that I managed to contain myself, but until we finished filming. As soon as they released Halle Berry, I tearfully told her that I had seen Jungle Fever, that it fascinates me, that her character in Monster’s Ball killed me and that I cried when she won the Oscar. I did the same to Julianne Moore and everyone else, until they got fed up.

I know you are a good boy. I feel it, I see it in you, in your family and in how you relate to the people around you. Have you always been like this?

I can't even imagine what my parents had to go through when they escaped from Chile and that has left me an inheritance of guilt that, perhaps, has determined the way in which my brothers and I navigated the world. We've also had very tragic losses in my family, and that helps you focus on what's really important and how you should treat people. I don't know what I believe in. I am completely agnostic and the idea of ​​a god seems silly to me. I do not mean that spirituality is alien to me, but I have not developed any link with that concept either, but I do know that the most valuable thing is to be a good person. Deep down, I think that's a lot more important than being famous, powerful or such. I can't take all that shit to my grave. But I have not always been like this. When I was 12 years old, we were already enjoying a very privileged situation and, compared to others, I was quite a spoiled boy. Then all that was over, and I had to learn the hard way in New York. Maybe if things had continued to be as easy as when I was in high school, I would be a douche now. Maybe the combination of genes, the education my parents gave us, and the fact that I broke my ass for more than fifteen years in New York that shapes you and also teaches you how you should behave.

You spent almost twenty years auditioning. What motivated you to continue, and not to give up?

Some content related tags: pp article / pp podcast / pp ps / pp confesses

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