![]() ![]() ![]() But in this case, everything was locked and loaded.” “You know, most of your experiences as an actor, people are kicking the tires to see if it’s a good fit. “When he walked in, it must have felt a little surreal,” Favreau says. To win Pascal over in their initial meeting, Favreau brought him behind the “Mandalorian” curtain, into a conference room papered with storyboards covering the arc of the first season. “And he’s somebody who takes his craft very seriously.” Favreau felt Pascal had the presence and skill essential to deliver a character - named Din Djarin, but mostly called Mando - who spends virtually every second of his time on screen wearing a helmet, part of the sacrosanct creed of the Mandalorian order.Ĭonvincing any actor to hide their face for the run of a series can be as precarious as escaping a Sarlacc pit. “He feels very much like a classic movie star in his charm and his delivery,” says Favreau. Over our three such conversations, it’s also clear that Pascal’s great good humor and charm have been at once ballast for a number of striking hardships, and a bulwark that makes his hard-won success a challenge for him to fully accept.īefore Pascal knew anything about “The Mandalorian,” its showrunner and executive producer Jon Favreau knew he wanted Pascal to star in it. “Don’t stop him!” he says with an almost naughty reproach. Before our interview really starts, Pascal points out, via Zoom, that my dog is licking his nether regions in the background. Talk with Pascal for just five minutes - even when he’s stuck in his car because he ran out of time running errands before his flight to make it to the set of a Nicolas Cage movie in Budapest - and you get an immediate sense of what Jenkins is talking about. He instantly becomes someone that everybody invites over and you want to have around and you want to talk to.” “I have to say, Pedro is one of the most appealing people I have known. “I continually am so surprised when everybody pegs him as such a serious guy,” says “Wonder Woman 1984” director Patty Jenkins. In “Wonder Woman 1984,” by stark contrast, he is delivering the kind of big, broad bad-guy character that populated the 1980s popcorn spectaculars of his youth. In “The Mandalorian,” he must hide his face - and, in some episodes, his whole body - in a performance that pushes minimalism and restraint to an almost ascetic ideal. The roles are at once wildly divergent and the best showcase yet for Pascal’s elastic talents. After his breakout on “Game of Thrones,” he became an instant get-me-that-guy sensation, mostly as headstrong, taciturn men of action - from chasing drug traffickers in Colombia for three seasons on Netflix’s “Narcos” to squaring off against Denzel Washington in “The Equalizer 2.” He had no way of knowing it at the time, of course, but some 40 years later, Pascal would in fact get the chance to star in a movie alongside a DC Comics superhero - not to mention battle Stormtroopers and, er, face off against the most formidable warrior in Westeros. “My sister was trying to get a rise out of me by telling me, ‘ This happened and that happened and then Superman did this and then, you know, the earthquake and spinning around the planet.'” In the face of such relentless sibling mockery, Pascal did the only logical thing: “I said, ‘All that happened in my movie too.'” “I know that they finished their movie,” he says, bending over in laughter. To his surprise, they seemed rather calm, but another detail sticks out even more. ![]() When he woke up, the movie was over, the theater was empty, and his parents were standing over him. In his shock and bewilderment at being lost, he curled up into an open seat and fell asleep. Instead, Pascal wandered into a different theater (he thinks it was showing the 1979 domestic drama “Kramer vs. ![]()
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