We Actually Have Sarah Paulson To Thank for Pedro Pascal

In a new interview with Esquire, Paulson opened up about bankrolling Pascal during the early years of his acting career. “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," she told the outlet.

Fresh out of school, Pascal struggled to break into the industry waiting tables at various New York restaurants while landing a few small roles on episodes of Undressed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “We would go to see movies all the time in those years, and we would get so lost in them,” Paulson recalled. “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.”

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“I died so many deaths,” Pascal told 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, and giving up the idea of it looking like I thought it would when I was a kid. There were so many good reasons to let that delusion go.”

It wasn't until Pascal got one of his first major roles as Javier Peña in Netflix's Narcos that the actor would get his big break. From there, Pascal would then go on to land leading parts in The Mandalorian and now The Last of Us, cementing his star status. Now with even more projects like Pedro Almodóvar's upcoming gay cowboy movie on the horizon, Pascal is one of Hollywood's hottest new commodities. “Everybody wants a piece of him,” Paulson observed.

“You just want him to succeed,” Paulson added. “And that to me, I feel like, is the sign of a major movie star. I’m ready for him to take the reins from the guys from romantic comedies past, like Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson and all these guys. He can be all that. Let’s remake Die Hard with Pedro. Remake all the Lethal Weapon movies with Pedro.”

Photo via Getty/ Mark Ralston/ AFP