Right now, Pedro Pascal is one of the biggest stars in the world that isn’t named Nic Cage. But even Nic Cage loves him, so you know he’s the real deal. Still, it’s hard to remember a time when Pascal wasn’t everywhere (it was only a few years ago, after all), but he has been open about his struggles as a young actor in the past, way before he ran (or levitated) with the Baby Yoda crowd.
Pascal met his longtime friend and fellow actor Sarah Paulson in New York in the late 1990s, where they would frequently dream of their future as bigshot Hollywood stars while watching movies. “We would go to see movies all the time in those years,” Paulson recently told Esquire. “and we would get so lost in them. You can fill in the blanks about the why of that however you like, but I think there were things we wanted to escape mentally, emotionally, spiritually.”
The two had quite a bond, remaining friends over the years, and it seemed like they were actual friends, not fake Hollywood buddies. But Paulson also helped him out when he began to struggle as an actor. “He’s talked about this publicly, but there were times when I would give him my per diem from a job I was working on so that he could have money to feed himself,” Paulson explained. Pascal has been open about his missteps in the entertainment industry early on, also telling Esquire, “My vision of it was that if I didn’t have some major exposure by the time I was 29 years old, it was over, so I was constantly readjusting what it meant to commit my life to this profession.”
Once he decided to adjust his mindset, Pascal was able to land jobs like Game of Thrones and The Last Of Us, which shot him to superstardom. Next up, he has a series of movies on the docket, including Strange Way Of Life with Ethan Hawke.
But Paulson isn’t surprised by his recent uptick in popularity. “You just want him to succeed,” she said. “And that to me, I feel like, is the sign of a major movie star.” Maybe now people will start celebrating him as an actor instead of just a silly online trend. Maybe!