After a decades-long climb in showbiz, balancing TV guest roles with restaurant shifts, Pedro Pascal is now one of Hollywood’s most in-demand leading men. This summer, the Chilean-born megastar continues his effortless domination of the silver screen with the Memorial Day Weekend release of The Mandalorian & Grogu.

BY WILL HARRIS  •  PHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES

Sometimes an actor comes along with a filmography so extensive that the first instinct when discussing him is to say, “That guy’s been in everything!” In the case of Pedro Pascal, it rarely feels like hyperbole.

A USA Network series? Check. His first TV credit was an episode of Good vs Evil, which he followed several years later with a recurring role on Graceland.

An MTV series? Check. He had a recurring role on Undressed in 1999.

Right after that, he was in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (where he got turned into a vamp), followed by an episode of Touched by an Angel. Next, he played a goth named Dio Morrissey on NYPD Blue, showcasing a rather impressive genre-spanning range.

He’s done the key Law & Order trifecta – Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent – and on the CBS front, he did episodes of CSI and Without a Trace and scored arcs on The Good Wife and The Mentalist. Keep in mind that all of these bookings came before Pascal ever had his real breakout role as Oberyn Martell, aka the Red Viper, on Game of Thrones.

Remarkably, that role only came about because one of Pascal’s friends, Sarah Paulson, passed on his audition video to her best friend, Amanda Peet, wife of Game of Thrones co-showrunner David Benioff.

“First of all, it was an iPhone selfie audition, which was unusual,” Benioff recalled to Variety in an email interview. “And this wasn’t one of the new-fangled iPhones with the fancy cameras. It looked like sh-t; it was shot vertical. The whole thing was very amateurish – except for the performance, which was intense and believable and just right.”

It was also, as pop culture history reveals, a game changer for Pascal’s career, starting the process of raising his profile in a huge way, to a level that a Chilean-born kid from Orange County could scarcely have imagined when he was growing up.

Actually, given his creativity, he probably could have imagined it. But there was a time when he was beginning to think it wouldn’t happen, and that was when he entered his thirties and still hadn’t “made it” in any traditional sense. (In the early days, Pascal spent years waiting tables to make ends meet – jobs he has famously joked he was constantly getting fired from while chasing acting roles.)

“In my 30s, I was supposed to have a career,” he told Vanity Fair. “Past 29 without a career meant that it was over, definitely. Basically, everybody took care of me well into my 30s. I had angels around me the whole time.”

Fortunately, by the time Pascal turned 40, Game of Thrones was in his rearview mirror, and he was working as a series regular on Netflix’s Narcos. He had a film career on the horizon, too, including The Great Wall with Matt Damon, The Equalizer 2 with Denzel Washington, and, perhaps the most exciting for him, Wonder Woman 1984.

“It was a f—ing offer,” Pascal recalled to Variety in 2020. “I wasn’t really grasping that Patty [ Jenkins, director of Wonder Woman 1984] wanted to talk to me about a part that I was going to play, not a part that I needed to get. I wasn’t able to totally accept that.”

Meanwhile, at approximately the same time, Pascal was busy promoting the first season of The Mandalorian, playing the titular character Din Djarin, a bounty hunter within the Star Wars universe who finds himself serving as an adoptive parent of sorts to Grogu, aka Baby Yoda.

“I’m still having this, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ feeling,” Pascal told Elle in 2019. “To be invited into an experience like this? I can never kill the fan in me – that’s just my upbringing.”

It’s an experience that’s still ongoing, one that – after three seasons on Disney+ – is finally taking him and his little green friend to the big screen for The Mandalorian and Grogu, which lands in theaters on May 22. Perhaps more importantly, it provides Pascal with the opportunity to take off that bloody helmet and show his face in the role for a change.

“It’s a tricky thing, because you want to see his face, but the archetype is that of the helmet,” director Jon Favreau told Empire Magazine. “How do we find a way to do it without undermining everything that we developed about the Mandalorian Creed? [So] you’ll see [Pascal] in the armor, both with and without the helmet. He’s a pretty physical performer. So we pushed a little further than we have in the past, as far as what he’s doing, helmet-off.”

Not that Pascal fans haven’t been seeing his face on both big and small screens quite a lot as of late: in addition to his stint on HBO’s The Last of Us, he’s worked on Gladiator II, Eddington, Materialists, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, with his role in the latter (Reed Richards) carrying over later this year into the much-anticipated Avengers: Doomsday (scheduled for a December 18 release).

But for Pascal, the fact that The Mandalorian and Grogu is actually playing in theaters made him emotional during a recent panel for the film at CCXP Mexico.

“As soon as I saw this [series], I knew that it would be a new authorship of a streaming experience,” he told the audience. “But I always had a dream in my heart that it would be on a big screen, because that’s how I was developed as a child. I went to the movie theater so much with my family, and I saw the Star Wars movies on the big screen.”

After those words, Pascal could be seen pausing to wipe away tears, and given his longstanding love of movies, it’s hardly a surprise. Pascal’s sister, Javiera Balmaceda, told Vanity Fair for her brother’s 2025 cover story, “When our parents got cable, the HBO song would come on and Pedro would run around the house yelling, ‘A movie is coming! A movie is coming!’”

All these years later, he’s still the same excited kid at heart. “I don’t even try to hide my excitement,” Pascal told Elle. “I was exposed to all of this, and I continue to consume it.”