When Sarah Paulson lent money to Pedro Pascal: ‘I would give him my per diem so that he could feed himself’

It is undeniable: Pedro Pascal is one of the most desired men on the internet. He is the star of the moment. Job offers are raining down on him. But for the protagonist of The Last of Us, finding work in the film world was not always easy. Ten years ago, the Chilean actor, who played Javier Peña in Narcos, was a total unknown. With the support of his mother, Veronica, he enrolled in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1993. There he crossed paths with actress Sarah Paulson. The pair have now been close friends for three decades.

“There were times when I would give him my per diem from a job I was working on so that he could have money to feed himself,” the American Horror Story protagonist told Esquire for the latest issue’s cover story. The star of The Mandalorian spent the late nineties going between auditions and waiter jobs in New York. Even though he received positive feedback, he didn’t find a career-making role in the Big Apple. In 1999, he decided to move to Los Angeles, where he appeared in the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “I guess the [positive comments], and this delusional self-determination, and no real skill at anything else, is what kept me going,” Pascal admits in the interview. His role as the prince Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones would eventually launch him to fame.

When the actor was 24 years old, his mother Veronica’s suicide shattered his life. In 2000, having returned to New York from Chile, the actor found himself going through difficult times, as Paulson recalls. “We would go to see movies all the time in those years, and we would get so lost in them. There were things we wanted to escape mentally, emotionally, spiritually,” the actress says. “My vision of it was that if I didn’t have some major exposure by the time I was twenty-nine years old, it was over, so I was constantly readjusting what it meant to commit my life to this profession, and giving up the idea of it looking like I thought it would when I was a kid. There were so many good reasons to let that delusion go,” Pascal says.

A 30-year friendship

“You just want him to succeed. And that to me, I feel like, is the sign of a major movie star. I’m ready for him to take the reins from the guys from romantic comedies past, like Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson and all these guys. He can be all that. Let’s remake Die Hard with Pedro. Remake all the Lethal Weapon movies with Pedro,” Paulson says in the same interview. It isn’t surprising that the Ratched protagonist offers up so much praise. The friendship between the two actors, who frequently post caring messages about each other on social media, is well-known.

In 2016, Paulson and Pascal attended together the 22nd edition of the Screen Actors Guild Awards in Los Angeles, California. Three years later, in 2019, the actress supported Pascal’s Broadway debut as Edmund in King Lear. “I love you Pascal, what an extraordinarily moving thing to witness your Broadway debut. I am in awe of you,” Paulson wrote in an Instagram post. The actor also uses every birthday or gathering with the star to share photos or videos showing Paulson dancing.

The duo’s latest and most entertaining joint appearance was on Saturday Night Live, which Pedro Pascal hosted for the first time on February 4. The Chilean invited the actress to participate in a segment in which he played a professor, and the two joked about the nickname “Daddy,” which has followed the actor for several years, since he attained the status of an erotic male myth.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition