Pedro for ShortList (08-24/17)
By Chris Sayer • Photographer: Tom Oldham
Related: photoshoot / list of articles
He was right there, moments ago, obediently standing on his mark at the centre of our makeshift hotel-room-photostudio, giving our photographer a display of facial dexterity you’d expect from a caffeine-jacked children’s presenter.
“More teeth! Wide eyes! Eyebrow! Eyebrow!” - the photographer effortlessly pulling the puppet strings of Pedro Pascal’s boyish, happy-despite-a-case-of-chronic-jetlag face.
Then he’s gone. And the screaming hen-party in the room next door is one uninvited guest up.
Rumours that male stripper is sending the women on the other side of the wall into a frenzy have got the better of him. While the rest of us, shackled to the set by our polite British sensibilities, titter and giggle at the thought of a greased-up strongboy thrusting the buffet table, only the Chilean in the room has the cool brass cojones to unstick from his mark and storm door one over to get eyeful.
Those cool brass cojones, we’re about to find out, are an inherited asset to which Pascal owes a lot more than just a cheeky peek inside a hen party.
Pedro Pascal has led a life punctuated by tyrannical, blood-soaked despots. and of them all, Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator who called for the heads of Pedro Pascal’s parents, seems like as good as any for us to kick off with. But first, booze
“Tequila’s one of the things that’ll keep me awake,” 42-yr-old Pascal says, now sitting across from me at the hotelbar, confirming he’s still in the fug of mixed time zones. He reaches out for the waiter, who promptly mistakes Pascal’s request of Herradura Anejo for Kahula before both agree on a Don Julio.
“With fresh lime juice, on the rocks,” he adds. “Tequila to stay awake, fresh lime to avoid scurvy.” My ‘make that two’ gesture may well be the most transparent and desperate to please Pascal’s ever had to endure. But blindly following suit soon pays off. If I hadn’t ordered the hard stuff before hearing him recount the tale of how his parents were forced, and miraculously managed, to flee Chile with a 9-month-old Pedro in their arms, I sure would have done afterwards.
“Theywere activists,” he begins, starting a story that hasn’t had any of its honor diluted by the years since 1976. “The story, as I understand it, is that there was a gun fight. Somebody had been shot in the leg, and a priest, knowing my father was the resident doctor of Santiago’s Catholic University, brought the wounded man to our home to tend his wounds. After my father patched him up, he was hidden in our home for a number of days. In that time, the priest had been captured, taken in custody, and tortured for information. He gave names, my parents’ identities were added to a list, and the regime came looking for them.”
Pascal raises his drink to his lips, his ice cubes clinking, a pre-emptive toast to the bravery, luck and gravity of what followed for his parents.
“They were forced into hiding for 6 months. In that time, they staked out the Venezuelan Embassy and worked out the miniscule window of opportunity they had to vault over the embassy walls to claim asylum, and find safety. They knew that, during their shift change, there was a moment when one guard would leave his post for the bus, as the entering guard was stepping off the bus. That was their tiny window, and they went for it. They climbed over the walls with me and, even with the guards inside trying to kick them out, managed to explain how their lives were in danger and knew the protocol for claiming asylum. It was pretty smart, and f*cking lucky to be honest with you.”
Successfully escaping the terrors of Pinochet’s torture camps and a fate similar to that of fellow activists -which, according to US government documents declassified in 2015, included being burned alive - the Pascals were gifted asylum in Denmark, before a Chilean doctor 1 year later offered Pascal’s father a position at his laboratory in San Antonio, Texas.
“It’s strange, because in a weird way there’s something so removed about the dramatic elements of the story. They exist more as ghosts in my experience of growing up, because I was a baby when it all happened. And it’s a story I've only really managed to unpack as an adult. When the subject was approached, I wouldn’t say I got much resistance from him, it wasn’t off limits, but clearly, it was something that was a little too fresh to talk about.”
I ask him how he feels about us being in a country - one he called home for 4 months earlier this years while filming Matthew Vaughn’s upcoming Kingsman: The Golden Circle - governed by a political party that still idolises Margaret Thatcher, a woman who openly named Pinochet as a “true friend” and actively lobbied against his prosecution for war crimes.
Pascal closes his mouth, conjures an invisible key out of thin air, uses it to slowly lock padlock on his lips, and then tosses it away. His gesture speaks volumes. It’s a firm but fair full-stop to question, until…
“I can’t talk sh*t about her in the UK, can I?”
I assure him that whatever he’s about to tell me, someone else is probably saying something far worse right now.
“Okay, I’m going to put it this way. I remember seeing The Iron Lady. I got really upset about how soft, charming and cute the movie was. And, as great as Meryl Streep was, I was very uncomfortable, not with her portrayal, but the movie as a whole. That movie. That movie was full of sh*t. Let’s leave it at that. You’re sure I can’t get into trouble by talking about Margaret Thatcher, right?”
I pull him up on how English his accent has suddenly become.
“Oh, it’s embarrassing. It’s because I’m hanging out with you. The instant I hear it, I can’t help but emulate it.”
Pascal’s mimetic abilities no doubt came in useful during formative years in the US, primarily in Orange County, California. He’s visibly embarrassed to admit they were filled with “the white privilege the world suffers from to degree”. He tells me about the time he got drunk at a roller derby and saw a young up-and-coming local band called No Doubt. He talks about cable TV. Spielberg films. He talks of doodling on his hand in class - a doodle that would later become permanent fixture as a bullseye tattoo at the corner of his thumb & forefinger. He talks as if he’s lived the perfect posters-inside-of-your-high-school-locker US existence that was beamed around the globe in kids’ TV shows like Saved By The Bell. Chile was every single one of the 5,800 miles away for Pascal.
Even so, he still managed to fall into the clutches of his second tyrannical despot. Although, this was one that would leave an impression on his childhood from the pages of his favorite book, in the shape of a villainous rabbit.
“It’s very anti-communist that book, isn’t it.” He says of Watership Down, a book he classes as a defining read and, unarguably, should have been more relatable and real to him than any of his fellow classmates.
“I do remember a traumatising experience as far as the movie was concerned. My dad took me to see what thought was a cartoon, and he was faced with rabbits ripping each other apart in fields of blood. After that, I got around to reading the book for assignment, and I remember it being so thrilling that I’d often catch myself standing up without realising to read it.”
If Pascal’s first 9 months are the basis for an Oscar-winning political thriller, and his childhood in Orange County a script for a mid-morning children’s sitcom, his years before hitting the Game Of Thrones payload is the grafting-actor-done-good biopic. It’s a classic, with 20 lousy restaurant jobs quit in favour of small-time TV parts and commercials leading up to the crack at the Big Time.
“Oh, it was more than 20,” he admits, taking us back to the time long before growing a top-shagger ‘tache for Game Of Thrones’ Oberyn Martell, and later the cartel-crushing ‘tache of DEA hero Javier Peña in Netflix smash Narcos.
“First, I wasn’t very good at it. Second, I would always prioritise acting over waiting tables, and third, I’m just not very good with authority.”
Which brings us neatly to tyrannical despot three, and maybe four, or lord knows how many depending on what cliff-hanging marker you’ve reached in George RR Martin and HBO’s claret-soaked fantasy universe. The story of Pascal’s acquisition, shall we say, of the Oberyn role and set up to the diving board hanging over stopped-in-the-street success, is a well-trodden tale and one that can be condensed down to: Pascal helps his graduate mentee prepare for his first taped audition; realises this was the role he was born to play; calls in huge favour from friend Sarah Paulson, who knows how to get a shoddy Pascal iPhone video script.reading to the right people; right people are wowed by Pascal and his riff on his father’s accent for the part; Pascal help bags himself a life-changing role that includes the most -re-enacted-down-the-pub death scene in the history of Game Of Thrones.
“That was the best part,” he says, his lime and tequila now nearing its end. “It was really hot in Dubrovnik during the 4 days that it took to shoot that fight scene. Having my eyes gouged out meant I was lying down on my back and having cooling rivers of blood put on my face. And then I had to lay there with chunks of prosthetics on my face, which were all very cool to touch, too. They had to do take after take, apologising for it. But I’d just say: ‘Hey, yot take your f*ckin’ time.’“
By the time this interview finds its way into your hands, Pedro Pascal will be days away from the world that brought him face to face with his most recent tyrant. Netflix will be opening the hatches and preparing to drop another bomb into the faces of fans all over again, all prepared to see Pascal’s DEA agent Javier Peña bring the Cali Cartel to its knees, all intrigued to see how the smash-hit can carry on beyond the death of its bulbous Colombian cocain baron, that dare we say, we’re all going to miss. How could we all fall fr such villainous sh*thead?
“Oh, there definitely is a machismo fascination there. But I never felt it. I grew up afraid of drug dealers. It’s not that I judged them, I was just afraid of them. So I’m not seduced by the golden guns and the mountains, the chesty company and the suitcase of cash. I understand the appeal, but it didn’t appeal to me. But I never felt I should demonise these guys either. And that was a worry for me. With the DEA, we’re dealing with a kind of, uh, vehemently conservative culture. I was real worried about the [the real life] Steve Murphy and Javier Peña finding out how liberal-minded I actually am. I was very self-conscious about it. But that thinking, it’s just in my blood.”
Right on schedule, Pascal’s ‘people’ appear, ready to whisk him away from his now-empty tequila glass and off to see Andrew Garfield star in the 7 ½ hr play Angels In America -the last place anyone jet lagged would want to be. I use his slow rise from his chair as an excuse to get one more question in. I begin to ask how someone who’s come from a background so deep-rooted in the left, from parents who risked everything for a liberal belief system, feels in this time of xenophobic politics and right-wing White House clownery. But he cuts me short.
“To be really candid about that, I carry around a certain amount of shame in terms of not doing more. Like I said, liberalism is in my blood. As hard work as it is to be in the arts of any kind, or to make a living from something that you feel passionate about, just posting something on social media isn’t enough. Yeah, I marched with my sister against the Iraq war in ‘03. Yes, my family and I have always been sort of, I suppose, very liberal doers, when give the opportunity. But I don’t have the balls to give up my career and dedicate everything I have to any particular cause. And yes, right now, I feel guilty about that.”
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