Is Pedro Pascal the biggest movie star on the planet right now? Consider the projects the 50-year-old Chilean-American actor has either recently completed or has in the pipeline, and this isn’t such a far-fetched claim. In a couple of months, he’ll be fronting Marvel’s flagship Fantastic Four reboot, playing the rubber-limbed Reed Richards, before reprising the role in next year’s Avengers: Doomsday, a film that’s shaping up to be one of the most lucrative ever made. He is also the title star – if not technically the face – of the first Star Wars film in seven years, the forthcoming The Mandalorian & Grogu, a follow-up to the three-season Disney+ series he also spearheaded. Over on HBO, he is one of two leads of The Last of Us, the buzzy, Emmy-winning apocalypse drama returning this week for season two, and just arrived on home release is Gladiator II, in which he enjoys a chunky role as an uxorious Roman general.
Take a breath, because we’re not done yet. Pascal has two films coming out over the next month: action comedy Freaky Tales (in cinemas 18 April) and comedy of errors The Uninvited (9 May). There’s a plum part in Celine Song’s forthcoming Materialists – the filmmaker’s first since her Oscar-nominated debut Past Lives – as one vertex of a love triangle (Chris Evans and Dakota Johnson being the others). And then there’s Eddington, a neo-western from Midsommar and Hereditary director Ari Aster, placing Pascal next to Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone and Austin Butler. Pascal has rapidly become one of the industry’s most in-demand actors, a ubiquitous and widely liked screen presence. But there’s nonetheless something peculiar about his rise, which seems to have transpired with a force and speed that almost defy explanation. Stardom like this manifesting after half a century on earth is rare, if not quite unheard of.
When Pascal got his breakthrough – as Game of Thrones’ ruthless, silver-tongued bisexual Prince Oberyn Martell, who joined four seasons in – he was already on the doorstep of his forties. When you think of movie stars who are around Pascal’s age, people like Phoenix, Christian Bale, Leonardo DiCaprio, Adrien Brody or Colin Farrell come to mind – performers who seem to have been around for ever, and who have become part of the furniture, pop-culturally speaking. While those actors were hitting their creative peaks in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Pascal was scrabbling around for one-off parts on whatever TV shows would hire him: he recalled having $7 to his name when residuals from a single 1999 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer saved him from destitution. “My entry-level lasted about 15 years, and we’re talking about not being able to see a doctor, getting sick, getting surgery, being able to pay my rent,” he said.
Being a late bloomer, though, isn’t some quirk of Pascal’s career, but a telling insight into his appeal. He arrived on the scene as a fully formed, adult man. Watch him in Thrones, or indeed in almost anything he’s in, and there’s a stolid assuredness to his screen presence. Actors like Pascal – men who are masculine and dashing in a mature, middle-aged way, with multi-generational appeal and a dexterity across different tones and genres – are not exactly ten-a-penny in Hollywood. After Thrones, you might have expected him to veer towards similarly flamboyant roles, but if anything, he’s pursued the opposite: in The Last of Us, The Mandalorian and Gladiator II, he is gruffness personified.
Pascal is a fine actor, for sure, but also – crucially – an actor without any history, without a type he must conform to or subvert. Many of the other big stars of his generation have seen their dazzle dulled somewhat by high-profile duds – what a colleague of mine refers to as “flop baggage”. In Hollywood, you either die a hero, or live long enough to star in a live-action Weetabix movie. But Pascal is a clean slate.
He’s had his luck, here and there: he crawled out from the wreck of 2020’s Wonder Woman 1984 – a tepidly reviewed and largely ignored superhero sequel, in which he played the villain – reputationally unscathed, something that can’t really be said of the film’s lead, the ailingly wooden Gal Gadot. He was similarly impervious to Matt Damon’s China-set oddity The Great Wall (2016), and the schlocky spy caper Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017). This is by virtue, perhaps, of being relatively little-known at the time: it will be a different story if Fantastic Four: First Steps or The Mandalorian & Grogu turn out to be major clangers, Pascal and his ascendant stardom now being front and centre. For now, though, his freshness is a virtue.
His steep canter up the Hollywood ladder can perhaps be attributed, too, to his off-screen charm; Pascal seems a popular figure on set and on the schmoozing circuit, and many of his former co-stars have spoken fondly of the friendships they have forged with him. His politics are progressive and forthright; it’s notable that Pascal was one of the few major figures recently throwing his support behind the young Rachel Zegler, amid the brutal and unearned Snow White backlash.
And yet, because of this, there is something disorientingly modern about Pascal the A-lister. He is a movie star for an era in which studios have dismantled the conventions of movie stardom. Is he a box-office draw? There’s been no real way of knowing. To date, and with the partial exception of Thrones, Pascal has never really transcended the material he works within. It is widely agreed, for instance, that he delivers a strong performance in The Last of Us, but he has never been the most discussed or celebrated part of that show – his stint as the lead of Netflix’s crime drama Narcos was much the same story.
In The Mandalorian, Pascal’s craft is only really discernible in short, infrequent bursts: Pascal – or, sometimes, a Pascal body-double – spends most of the series with a helmet obscuring their face, bound as his character is by the rules of a cult-like clan of facemask fanatics. Then there are the ignominious other projects, lacklustre studio fare such as Wonder Woman 1984 or the Nic Cage action comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in which Pascal is unable to elevate paltry material.
In a strange way, all this may end up helping him. Pascal is staring down a period of high stardom as a still unknown quantity. The boundaries of his appeal are yet to be drawn up. He has goodwill on his side: it’s nice to see a figure like Pascal – a Chilean immigrant who fled the Pinochet dictatorship as a child, a vocal supporter of LGBT+ causes, an actor whose body of work subverts the behaviours of conventional masculinity – get such a break. It’ll be nicer still if he proves to be great.
‘The Last of Us’ is available to watch in the UK on Sky and NOW
