Pedro Pascal doesn’t know who needs to hear this, but should you ever meet him, please don’t stick your fingers in his eyes.
Game of Thrones fans will recognize Pascal as Oberyn Martell, the warrior prince who nearly bests Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane in a season 4 trial-by-combat—only to have his hulking opponent gouge his eyeballs out and squish his cranium like an overripe cantaloupe. Even for a show that never introduced a character it couldn’t incinerate, disembowel, or carelessly toss off a parapet, it was a shocking demise.
More shocking still—to the 44-year-old Chilean-born actor at least—is the number of fans who feel perfectly comfortable leading with their thumbs after requesting a photo. “I used to let them do it,” Pascal says, laughing. “But after years of getting a close-up of the dirt under strangers’ fingernails, now I just take a quick selfie. People are asking less [these days]. I think they’re starting to read me correctly.”
In The Mandalorian, streaming now on Disney+, Pascal dons an accessory that could eliminate such occupational hazards: a helmet, specifically a dark-visored one, similar to Boba Fett’s. As the titular gunfighter in this new series set in the Star Wars universe, he steps onto the most hallowed ground in cinematic-franchise history, alongside writer, creator, and executive producer Jon Favreau and episode directors like Taika Waititi and Bryce Dallas Howard.
For the most part, Pascal is playing it cool. Sort of. Or not really. “I’m still having this ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ feeling,” Pascal says giddily. “To be invited into an experience like this? I can never kill the fan in me—that’s just my upbringing.”
That upbringing involved long days spent at a San Antonio theater—he once waited out three straight sellouts before finally scoring a ticket to Return of the Jedi—but it didn’t begin there. In Chile, his parents were part of the opposition to the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who came to power only months before Pascal was born. The family went into hiding and eventually sneaked into the Venezuelan embassy in Santiago, where they claimed political asylum and relocated to Denmark. Pascal has no memories of the brief stop in Scandinavia, but he keeps a picture of himself from that time: “a big, brown-eyed freezing baby in a red snowsuit,” he says.
From Denmark, Pascal, his parents, and older sister moved to Texas, where his moviegoing became a three-times-a-week habit. “[My parents] weren’t very selective in terms of what was appropriate for a child,” Pascal admits. “I saw First Blood when I was, like, six years old. There was an entire week one summer when my father was working and my mother was getting her PhD, so she’d tell the people working at the Cineplex, ‘I’m going to drop off my son and will pick him up around 6 p.m.’ She’d say, ‘He’s going to watch E.T.,’ but I’d watch Poltergeist instead. I’d already seen E.T.!”
After the family relocated again, this time to California, all those days Pascal spent in darkened movie theaters finally found some nourishing light—he began attending the Orange County School of the Arts, and participating in local theater in Costa Mesa and summertime acting programs. “My mom didn’t put up much of a fight,” he recalls. “Anything to stop me from watching 13 hours of television a day.”
Following his graduation, Pascal moved to the East Coast to attend NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. As a young actor in New York, he began building the résumé of a typical workaday thespian (he runs through the list: “unheard-of theater, all the cop shows”), but Game of Thrones proved a career inflection point. He followed it with another prestige drama—Netflix’s Narcos, playing Javier Peña, a DEA agent hunting Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar—and big-budget action flicks like Kingsman: The Golden Circle and Triple Frontier, the latter of which he appeared in opposite Ben Affleck and longtime friend Oscar Isaac.
When he was offered the lead in The Mandalorian, Pascal didn’t need much convincing, but it was Isaac (who costars in his third Star Wars film in December) who provided some anyway, just in case.“Oscar was very much the voice of, ‘Make sure it works out,’ ” Pascal says. “He played a part in making me feel certain about what I was joining.”
Next June, Pascal will appear in Wonder Woman 1984, a sequel to the 2017 comic book juggernaut that grossed more than $821 million worldwide. Director Patty Jenkins recently confirmed the actor would be playing billionaire supervillain Maxwell Lord.
“I’d worked with [Pascal] once before, on a pilot, and [he was] incredibly capable, skilled, wonderful, and dry,” Jenkins says. “The Pedro I’ve gotten to know on this movie is this dazzling, hilarious spinning top. That’s always a fun thing to find out about actors you admire. You start to see these other shades and dimensions. That’s catnip to a director.”
For Pascal, the opportunity to hop between the Star Wars and DC universes, flashing those new shades and dimensions, has been a long time coming. “I don’t even try to hide my excitement,” he says. “I was exposed to all this, and I continue to consume it.” He’s still the kid alone in the Cineplex. He’s still sneaking from fantasy to fantasy, stars—and nothing else, please—in his eyes.
This article originally appeared in the December 2019 issue of ELLE.
