The actor Pedro Pascal was born in Santiago, Chile in 1975 under the name Pedro Balmaceda. He was related to Chilean president Salvador Allende through his mother, and just like Allende, everyone in Pascal’s family was a leftist Democrat, which meant that when Allende’s socialist government was overthrown in 1973 by the dictator Augusto Pinochet, Pascal’s family was immediately listed as enemies of the state and they eventually fled Chile to seek refuge when Pascal was just a baby, later receiving asylum in Denmark before finally settling in the United States, where Pascal was raised in San Antonio, Texas and later Orange County, California. Orange County was where Pascal pursued acting at the Orange County School of the Arts, graduating in 1993 before moving to New York to study at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, graduating from there in 1997. After his mother died, Pedro Balmaceda changed his name to “Pascal” (his mother’s surname) as a tribute to her.

Pascal landed guest roles on a number of hit shows from the 1990s to the 2010s, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Touched by an Angel, NYPD Blue, Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Without a Trace, Nurse Jackie, Brothers & Sisters, CSI and Homeland, while his first recurring role came in the first two seasons of The Good Wife from 2009 to 2011 as assistant state’s attorney Nathan Landry, followed by other recurring roles in the FX boxing drama Lights Out (2011), the ABC drama Red Widow (2013), USA Network action drama Graceland (2013-14), and CBS procedural The Mentalist (2014).

Despite this, Pascal still wasn’t working enough to make a living on acting alone, so he still took part time jobs waiting at restaurants, and when he experienced particularly hard times, his friend and fellow actor Sarah Paulson would lend him money. The struggle of being an actor was so real that Pascal almost quit the profession entirely, but a residual check he received for his role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was enough to give him a financial boost and had incentivized him to keep trying. Of course all the struggle finally paid off when he was offered the role of Oberyn Martell in the fourth season of the hugely popular HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones in 2014. Pascal earned praise from critics and viewers for his performance as a prince who seeks revenge against the Lannisters for their roles in the death of his family and is thereby accused of poisoning Joffrey. Some publications even called Oberyn one of the best characters on the show (and also one of the sexiest characters on the show, which would be a recurring sentiment in his career).

A year after starring in Game of Thrones, Pascal got his first main role in the Netflix crime drama Narcos as DEA agent Javier Peña, the man tasked with bringing down Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Narcos received good reviews and was popular enough to last three seasons on Netflix from 2015 to 2017. By the third season Pascal became the lead actor and narrator as his character sought to bring down the Cali Cartel following Escobar’s downfall in Season 2.

At the same time, Pascal was also starring in movies like Philip K. Dick-based sci-fi thriller The Adjustment Bureau (2011), the horror comedy Bloodsucking Bastards (2015), The Great Wall (2016) starring Matt Damon, Matthew Vaughn’s spy comedy Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017), the sci-fi indie film Prospect (2018), The Equalizer 2 (2018) opposite Denzel Washington, J.C. Chandor’s action-adventure film Triple Frontier (2019), the DC superhero film Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) for which he played supervillain Maxwell Lord, the Robert Rodriguez superhero film We Can Be Heroes (2020) for which he played a superhero with magnetic powers, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) opposite Nicolas Cage, and most recently the action comedy Freaky Tales (2024), The Uninvited (2024), DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot (2024) for which he voiced a fox named Fink, and Ridley Scott’s historical epic Gladiator II (2024) for which he portrayed Acacius, the Roman army general-turned-Colosseum gladiator. Pascal is also set to play Reed Richards aka Mister Fantastic in Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps as well as in future Marvel films.

However, Pedro Pascal’s first lead roles on television would be his most famous roles when he was cast in the Disney+ space Western The Mandalorian (2019-23) and in the HBO video game adaptation The Last of Us (2023-present). Set in the Star Wars universe and taking place after the events of Return of the Jedi, The Mandalorian centers around Din Djarin, an orphan who was adopted into the Mandalorian culture and trained as a warrior, eventually becoming a bounty hunter. Pascal reprised the role in the 2021 spin-off series The Book of Boba Fett and will reprise the role at least one more time in an upcoming theatrical feature from Lucasfilm that will continue the story in the Disney+ series. The Last of Us centers around Joel Miller, an emotionally closed off pandemic survivor with a tragic past who is tasked with smuggling a girl (Bella Ramsey) who is immune to the infection across the country and into a quarantine zone.

Both The Mandalorian and The Last of Us became critically acclaimed fan favorites, with both receiving Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Drama Series and Pascal himself receiving a nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his role as Joel in The Last of Us, which is the first video game adaptation to become a major multi-nominated awards contender. Pascal is currently set to continue playing Joel in two more seasons which will adapt the PlayStation 4 game The Last of Us Part II.