From bit parts to starring roles. Pedro Pascal spent nearly two decades taking one-off acting gigs in film and television before he rose to prominence for his role on Game of Thrones in 2014.
The Chile native joined the cast of the fantasy drama in season 4 as Oberyn Martell.
“It was a dream, you know,” Pascal said of his tenure on the HBO series during an April 2022 interview with British GQ. “It was this great role, at the height of the show’s popularity, a perfectly written season, a perfectly written role — go in, shoot for 10 weeks, leave.”
The Wonder Woman 1984 actor added: “Nobody got a chance to be sick of me. I had comfortable costumes, which is a miracle. I didn’t have a heavy wig. I might have been the luckiest human to have passed through that show.”
GoT showrunner David Benioff revealed during an October 2020 Variety interview that Pascal’s audition was shot on an iPhone and “looked like s—t.” He told the outlet at the time: “The whole thing was very amateurish. Except for the performance, which was intense and believable and just right.”
Pascal’s star continued to rise when he was cast as DEA agent Javier Peña on the Netflix series Narcos in 2015. On the silver screen, he appeared in films including Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017), Triple Frontier (2019) and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022), which he costarred in with Nicolas Cage. Working with the National Treasure star served as a source of inspiration for Pascal.
“There was almost something about, I don’t know, reawakening the things that you care about and why you got into it in the first place, because he’s still challenging himself, he’s super prepared, he’s coming up with new ideas, and honestly, it was an incredible challenge to rise to. But it was mostly a really beautiful inspiration and a reminder of why I had this fantasy to start with,” the Bubble actor said during an April 2022 appearance on BroBible’s “Post-Credit Podcast.”
In addition to expanding his film resume, Pascal began starring in the Disney+ Star Wars series The Mandalorian in 2019. In 2023, he returned to HBO, portraying Joel in the post-apocalyptic drama The Last of Us, based on the video game of the same name.
During a January 2023 interview with Entertainment Weekly, the Book of Boba Fett actor said he had “such a great time” making season 1 of the series that he didn’t dare speculate about future installments.
“You almost feel like if you have a really good experience, it’s asking for too much that it’d be well received or that experience be translated to an audience, but that’s the intention and what our whole want is more than anything,” he told the outlet.
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Scroll through to see Pascal through the years:
