There are usually a lot of Latinos looking to make their big splash in Hollywood. Of course, not everyone makes it, and most of those who achieve the American Dream are usually from Mexico. But the case of Peter Pascal47-year-old Chilean, protagonist of the series The Mandalorianof Disney+, e The Last of Uswhose first episode HBO Max just released, is clearly peculiar.
José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal, born in Santiago de Chile on April 2, 1975, worked in the theater, both as an actor and director, but also in television and cinema, and if he became a US citizen, he was not, like other Mexicans, such as Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu, for those work and trade union needs they ask for in the Northern Country.
His first job, for which international audiences paid attention to him, was playing Prince Oberyn Martell game of Thronesthere was also Javier Peña narcosthe Netflix series, until it moved to The Mandalorianwas the villain of Wonder Woman 1984and just like Channing Tatum was Tequila, he was Whisky Kingsman: The Golden Circleand now we see him as Joel Miller, the father who lost his daughter and struggles to survive in the catastrophic and pandemic The Last of Us.
The videogame adaptation of the same title is already a huge success: its premiere episode became the most-watched premiere in HBO Max history in Latin America in the first 24 hours of availability.
a nomad
The son of a child psychologist and a fertility doctor, Pedro is the grandson of Spanish parents. His parents sympathized with the socialist government of Salvador Allende, and when Pedro was born they were opponents of the dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet. His mother, Verónica Pascal, is a relative of Andrés Pascal Allende, leader of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR). They were granted political asylum in Denmark and later moved to the United States.
The Pascals lived first in San Antonio, Texas, and later in Orange County, California. Pedro has always been tall and athletic and even competed in the Texas state championships as a swimmer.
And yes, he gave up swimming to take acting lessons.
At the age of 18 he moved to New York, where he continued to perfect his dramatic studies, and, last but not least, while studying at New York University, his father suffered a scandal at the Orange County fertility clinic that he ran with two other doctors and the family (father, mother, two younger sisters) returned to Chile.
His mother died soon after, and Pascal decided to use his mother’s surname professionally. As he said, not just to honor her: the Americans had difficulty pronouncing her surname, Balmaceda.
Pedro does not live far from the reality of his native country and, although he did not vote in the last presidential election, he has expressed his public support for Gabriel Boric, who became president in 2021.
Her career has been more active in television than film, appearing in popular series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The good wife, graceland and also in the third season of Homelands.
Almost ten years have passed, in June 2013, when he was signed to play Oberyn Martell, the “Red Viper”, in the fourth season of game of Thrones. It wasn’t many episodes, just 7, but enough for audiences, critics, and several producers to hang on.
He recalls that he was a fan of the series, and when his agent told him that he had been called to audition for the role of the man who wants to avenge his sister’s gory death, he couldn’t believe it. Nor that he recorded the 17 pages of her audition on his iPhone.
But Pedro is a very confident boy. Pascal says that, for this new series, also on HBO, he disobeyed the orders he was given and sat in his living room to play the video game. They had asked him not to get in contact with him, so that it would not influence his interpretation. Well, Pedro believed that doing exactly the opposite was the right thing to do.
“I hadn’t heard of the game,” he said. The instruction (from HBO) was: don’t play. I ignored them. I tried to play and was very, very mean. But my nephew was amazing. It was important for me to play situations directly related to what was originally in the game: physically, visually and even vocally.
The series takes place from the end of its first episode in the present time, but after the world has succumbed to a strange disease, which transforms human beings into ferocious, devouring and murderous beasts. Joel meets Ellie (Bella Ramsey) by chance and has to take her to a specific place. Thus ended the first chapter of the 9 that this first season will have and that HBO Max will premiere every Sunday at 11pm.
And the same week it premiered The Last of UsDisney + has announced the premiere date of the third season of The Mandalorian. It will be from Wednesday March 1, when we will see him, with the helmet in most of the episodes, yes, hiding his face, in the role of the lone bounty hunter who meets Grogu, the Baby Yoda who has conquered the hearts of all fans. Star Warsfrom which The Mandalorian It is by far the best spin-off ever made.
And in May he will travel to the Cannes Film Festival, where he will present his new work, directed by Pedro Almodóvar. It’s a short film strange way to livea gay western in which his character, the cowboy Silva, crosses the desert on horseback to meet an old friend (Ethan Hawke), with whom they were gunmen a quarter century ago.
Flexible in the genre of action and comedy (did you see last year The weight of talentin which she accompanies Nicolas Cage?), her future looks more promising than her brilliant past.
Source: Clarin
