The Hidden Side of Pedro Pascal
Welcome, one and all, to Hot Pedro Summer, a span of three months in which the actor Pedro Pascal has become as ubiquitous as he is charming. Less than a year after a major role in Gladiator II , he's given us a thoughtful, funny turn in a rom-com ( Materialists ), played a complex, layered antagonist to Joaquin Phoenix in Ari Aster's Eddington , and has capped the whole thing off by playing Mister Fantastic himself in the fifth attempt to breathe life into the Fantastic Four . And like Reed Richards, who can bend and extend his body as if it were made of taffy, Pascal has stretched himself into our day-to-day lives. Thanks to GIFs, red-carpet clips, Saturday Night Live appearances, and Emmy award nominations, Pascal's trademark soft-spoken baritone and gentle smile are everywhere to be seen. In 2026, when a film based on The Mandalorian is scheduled for release, he will become the lead in two different major movie franchises. Hot Pedro Summer may be nearing its climax, but he's just warming up.
In case you think I'm complaining about his sudden omnipresence, let me get this out of the way: Pedro Pascal is an astonishing actor who more than deserves the success he has. I have written more than a few of these actor assessments (and a whole book about acting ), and Pascal is as close to a complete package as has risen to stardom in a generation. (In Materialists , when Dakota Johnson's character uses those same two words to describe him, explaining that he's “a 10 out of 10 in every category,” you can practically hear the audience nodding along.) He's a serious actor who is also a great blockbuster leading man who is also very good-looking, and on top of all of it, he possesses a masculine charisma as easygoing as it is undeniable. He could very well be something like a new Denzel Washington, the kind of actor who can distill his work on-screen to follow the needs of a tentpole or thicken it with nuance and care for more meaningful work. Of course, that would also require Hollywood to make the kind of movies that showed us Washington's vast gifts in the 1980s and '90s, which it largely does not anymore. Since it doesn't, Pascal provides a fascinating window into what remains of the Hollywood star factory: what it looks for, what it wants, and what it will allow its actors to do.
Pascal is an unlikely star. He didn't get his breakthrough role as Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones until he was almost 40, and he has gradually ascended the TV and franchise ladder over the past decade. There are few 50-year-old movie stars out there, and fewer still that are relatively new to fame and have what appear to be their real, original faces. Pascal also is Chilean and has not cast away his accent, although he occasionally opts to forgo it. He has a serious theater background—training at New York University's prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, membership in the storied LAByrinth Theater Company, and experience acting, writing, and directing in New York and Los Angeles—which one can feel in the completeness of his characters, the sense that they have arrived fully formed and are not simply distillations of a star's persona.
Hollywood became big business in the 1930s in large part through its use of stars and the canny optimization of what amounts to a massive factory for producing them. Stars would be discovered everywhere from on Broadway to, famously, at a soda fountain , then fed into this factory's maw. As it digested them, it would teach them the basics of acting, dance, horseback riding, elocution, and more, while also trying to discover their essential persona. By the end of the process, a star was not so much born as excreted into screen tests and small roles to develop them for the majors. Personae could be hard to find—Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe tried on a few—but once it was discovered, the star could speak their persona into film after film. Bolstering the persona would be the studio's PR machine, which would make sure the public saw that persona as an extension of the real actor behind it, sometimes resorting to almost completely fictitious biographies in fan magazines to make it happen. If actors behaved in a way that violated their persona, particularly if it resulted in a scandal, the persona could also be retooled to take advantage. The star system helped streamline production, because writers knew who was anchoring their films and what they could be expected to do, and beloved stars also brought audiences to the theater in droves. Audiences were not gullible marks in this scenario. They understood how this system worked and went to the movies not for verisimilitude but to see their favorite stars implement their persona in a modern mystery, or screwball comedy, or domestic melodrama. If you were a fan of a specific actor, part of the thrill of seeing them on-screen came from watching them figure out how their persona worked in a given picture.
Thus, from the beginning of Hollywood's golden age, there has been a tension between being a star and being an actor. The major American acting teachers of the '30s and '40s often tried very hard to dissuade their most talented students from going to Hollywood, because true acting—acting that prized versatility, real feelings, a transformative approach to character and self—could be found only on the stage. It was only really when the star factory fell apart, in the 1950s, that those attitudes began to change, although they persisted well into the late 20th century. Even today, a divide has remained between stardom on the one hand and acting on the other.
This summer's trio of Pascal films also shows us how he navigates this divide, as a great actor who too has a well-developed persona that is now leading to frequent typecasting. You probably don't need me to tell you what Pascal's essential star persona is built around—just search his name in your GIF keyboard and you'll find it. Pascal is both America's Dad and his Daddy. Having risen to stardom by playing surrogate fathers for an alien and a teenager immune to a zombie plague in two different TV shows, Pascal has developed a sexy, mellow masculinity, one built not on hitting the gym (and the PEDs) for months but rather on tenderness. His masculinity is not the stoicism of Clint Eastwood, or the neuroticism of Dustin Hoffman, or the hulking physicality of any number of superheroes; instead, it's rooted in deep feeling and sensitivity. Even Joel, the selfish and extraordinarily violent man he played on The Last of Us , came threaded with cords of heartache and yearning that made his worst acts understandable.
This brand of masculinity—one that, as a mostly straight but not particularly butch middle-aged dad, I greatly appreciate—is on full display this summer. In Fantastic Four , Pascal plays one of the very few canonical superheroes who are also dads. In the film, Reed Richards—a hyperintelligent, hyperanalytical scientist—confronts the limits of his supremacy for the first time in the twinned forms of expecting fatherhood and Galactus, a seemingly unstoppable planet-eating entity older than the universe itself. While Pascal's turn lacks the arrogance that makes Richards work in the best Fantastic Four comics, he brings real uneasiness and pain to the character, rooting a galaxy-spanning story in simple human emotions.
In Eddington , Pascal plays Ted Garcia, the liberal mayor of a small town in New Mexico during the early days of the COVID pandemic. Pascal is not actually in very much of the film, but in his 10 or so minutes of screen time, he makes a huge impression. His Ted has a whole history, a way of moving through the world, a friendly assuredness that comes from having achieved power. But he's also power-hungry, and his desire for higher office has made him a hypocrite, one who is midway through selling out his town to corporate interests. In other words, his public self is assured, but desire has made the ground underneath him unstable, a state Pascal allows us to see by showing us Ted's flop sweat, particularly when he tries in vain to corral his teenage son and keep him from creating problems for his political campaign.
Pascal's dad persona, and the way he plays with it to bring Ted to life, is captivating. Ted is a literal father to his son Eric, but he also sees himself as the wise, tolerant, and benevolent father to the town of Eddington. He even treats Phoenix's Sheriff Joe Cross, with whom he has had decades of poisoned interactions, the way a father would. Or, rather, the way we all wish our fathers would , with patience, kind concern, and care, even when we misbehave. When Joe throws a fit in a supermarket about not wanting to wear a mask due to his asthma, Pascal doesn't berate him, or attack him, or humiliate him. He instead extends what appears to be genuine, paternal concern.
Phoenix and Pascal's scenes were all shot in a block, fairly early on in the filming process. As Phoenix told me in an interview, “Pedro seemed very clear on who Ted was. I'm thinking particularly about the scene in the supermarket. I was not sure of what I was doing at that point. It was early in the shoot, and I didn't fully understand where I was. And of course in hindsight I realized that that's exactly what Joe was experiencing, and Ted is somebody who thinks he's doing exactly what he's meant to be doing.” Pascal's preparedness had another side benefit for his co-star. “Pedro was so gracious in allowing me to find it, because, let me tell you, I was all over the fucking map, and what you're seeing in that scene is, I guess, subconsciously I really worked myself up into a state of frustration and anger and impotence. I remember the take we used, it felt alive. I had somebody I was working with that was able to allow that to happen.” Even on set, he can be the patient father to his co-stars.
Pascal has been our dad so many times that many friends of mine have started to wonder what else he can do. For that, you have to look at lower-budget projects, and his older, pre-stardom work. In the Pedro Almodóvar short Strange Way of Life , Pascal and Ethan Hawke star as two iconic Wild West figures—a rancher and a sheriff, respectively—with a twist: They had an intense love affair decades ago, when they both worked as hired guns. They reunite and share one intense night of lovemaking and reminiscing before both characters' hidden agendas drive them apart again. The film isn't altogether successful, in large part because, with Almodóvar working in English for only the second time, the screenplay occasionally feels fed through Google Translate in its stilted rhythms and awkward phrasings. But both Pascal and Hawke do wonderful work, making the roles feel natural even when the dialogue does not. Pascal always keeps you guessing about what his rancher really wants, even while gazing at Hawke's sheriff with 25 years of regret and lust in his eyes.
Materialists , the lowest-budget entry into Hot Pedro Summer, also offers glimpses of its versatility. But it is a tough film to recommend, in part because of the aforementioned gulf that can sometimes loom between stars and actors. Dakota Johnson plays a professional matchmaker who, years earlier, broke up with her struggling-actor boyfriend, played by Chris Evans, because she wanted financial security. After a brief fling with Pascal's Harry, an improbably gentle private-equity millionaire, she slowly realizes she wants love after all, and she and Evans reunite. There are many things about the movie that don't work—although it's Celine Song's take on the rom-com, it isn't funny, the characters don't really make much sense, and it's boring—but the biggest problem is that while all three leads are stars, only Pascal is also an actor. Evans has done wonderful work as Captain America and can be very funny in films, like Knives Out , that allow him to do an ironic take on a character, but he is unable to inhabit his role in Materialists , despite obviously working hard to do so. Johnson, on the other hand, does not appear to desire being an actor at all, delivering her lines through her trademark who-gives-a-shit haze and wandering like a lost sylph through Song's frames.
Pascal's final scene in the movie, which revolves around Johnson's Lucy discovering that his character has had leg-lengthening surgery to add 6 inches to his height, demonstrates what makes him such a compelling screen presence. Within the scene, he is able to insert a shim of comic distance between himself and the character, then remove it at will. He grasps what the scene needs from a storytelling perspective and provides it, shifting, almost sentence by sentence, between wryly commenting on the character and entirely inhabiting him. This knack for storytelling , for giving the scene exactly what it needs to succeed, is an innate talent, one that is extremely difficult to teach. When Johnson details the cosmetic surgery she's had, Pascal responds, simply, “Right, I figured” in a way that had my theater howling with laughter. It's exactly what you're not supposed to say, but Harry is such a blunt instrument that he shoves aside all sense of proper manners.
What also makes it work is that the little space for comedy is made out of not so much judging the character as enjoying getting to be him. One of the keys to Pascal's charisma is that he clearly loves being a star. Perhaps due to how much he's worked on his way to stardom, or his theater education and background, he doesn't have any need to prove how serious an artist he is. Part of watching Pascal is watching him enjoy himself on-screen but never doing it too much that it overwhelms the material. If Tom Hanks, the last major star to become America's Dad, was often hailed as our answer to Jimmy Stewart, then this quality makes Pascal our era's heir to Cary Grant, who always seemed to be having the time of his life, while having no anxiety about showing you how hard he was working, even when he worked very hard indeed.
Thus The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent , the best guys-being-dudes movie in years, and one that depends entirely on how delightful it is to watch Pascal having a blast with a role. The film is a buddy comedy, one in which Pascal plays Javi Gutiérrez, a suspected arms dealer who has hired Nicolas Cage (played by himself, of course) to come to his birthday party in Mallorca. Cage is recruited by the CIA to spy on Javi, which he does by agreeing to co-star with Javi in an improvised movie the two will make together. They gradually bond, in part because Javi turns out to be the world's biggest Cage fan, a man who owns not only a wax replica of Cage from Face/Off but his character's twin golden guns to boot. Instead of playing the father, Pascal in this film is like a little kid, getting to see his greatest dreams come true.
In one early scene, Javi takes Cage for a drive, only to suddenly pull over the car and run away as if chased by an unseen antagonist. There is no pursuer—he's just playing acting being in a movie with his hero. When he gets caught, Pascal moves Javi from inept improvising to a sincere, tearful paean to the power of acting to bring joy into the lives of people in pain, and then into a suddenly much better improv. He's so infectiously persuasive that Cage—enraged at being awakened early and thrown into a situation masterminded by a deranged Superman—can't help but play along, jumping off a cliff with Pascal into the Atlantic Ocean.
And isn't that, on some level, what a lot of acting is about? You stand on the cliff's edge and implore those in the audience to let go of whatever is going on with them and make the imaginative leap with you into the unknown. Pascal's presence always assures you, even as the wind rushes around you and the ocean looms larger and larger in your field of vision, that you are in good hands. Let us hope that he avoids letting the dad persona become a prison, as it currently threatens to, and instead keeps finding new cliffs off which to jump.
