Pushkin. This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show today. I'm joined by actor Pedro Pascal. You've watched him in Game of Thrones, Narcos, Wonder Woman nineteen eighty four, and The Mandalorian. This spring, he has three new projects, including The Bubble directed by Judd apataw House, Come with the Bird directed by Jannick Sobravo, and most recently, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent directed by Tom Gormackan. The film stars Nick Cage as Nick Cage, an actor who, to avoid financial ruin, accepts a one million dollar offer to attend a wealthy fan's birthday party. The fan, of course, is played by Pascal. Here's a clip from The Unbearable Weight a Massive Talent. You can't quit acting. You can't. That's not your business, whether you like it or not. You have a gift, and that gift brings light and joy to an increasingly dark and broken world. And to turn your back on that gift is to turn your back on the entire human race. We have to go now, we have to jump. You're in an untenable situation, you know that, rack, and let's get you out of here. That was a scene from The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, now out in theaters across the country. Pascal was born in Chile, but grew up here in America watching Nick Cage through the nineteen eighties in films like Peggy Sue Got Married, Raising Arizona, Moonstruck. Now, forty years later, Pascal is sharing screen time with Cage himself. As you'll hear, the full circle nature of this moment is not lost on him, neither is his recent success. But Pascal's life didn't always look the way it does today at age forty seven. It's been a long, winding journey from an immigrant kid who dreamed of being in movies to the actor we've come to love. And it's the incredible journey between those two people that we try to chart in this conversation. I hope you enjoy pa, See how are you feeling? I feel good. It's nice to be here. There was no traffic and I like driving. People on a podcast love to hear about la People talk about driving traffic right Historically they loved this. It came over from Venice. It was a long way. I felt bad, I did. There was no traffic, Okay, good. I mean, once you get to the one, let's do this, yes, okay? And did you get to we'll hid to the one ten? You know, and you start to go through downtown. Of course it was traffic. He getting to the five windows down on the way over here, on the way over okay, and then playing music, it got congested. I was actually listening to KPCC, but normally I would be listening to music and driving kind of fast. This film unbearable way of massive talent. It's coming out today today. Yeah, what do you feel on a day like this? Do you wake up nervous? I don't know how to feel about it, because it's never been the same. It's always been, at least through my experience, what seems like unique and different than how I would have expected it to be or feel like how I fantasized about it as a kid or as an unworking actor. Because today this would be like the first thing that I've done that is not coming out on a streaming service or during the pandemic or with me actually in town. It's like a movie out in the world. People have to go to theaters to see it. Yeah, yeah, how they used to do them? Yeah, And we're still sort of figuring out how to do that again. So I don't know what normal is, obviously, but none of it exists in the realm of what my expectations or fears would be. So it sort of eliminates any kind of expectation because I'm like, I don't know what the hell is going on, and this bond is planned anymore. I'm gonna go do a podcast today and there's no traffic. There's no traffic, there's no Does that mean nobody's going to the movies? It's good to just bring it back to yourself. There's no there's no traffic. Does that mean my film is bombing? People aren't going to the nine thirty showing? Does that mean that the movie that I have a supporting role in and people the actors are narcissists And they're not. They're just not. They're just they're like you, You're you're selfless exactly exactly. I'm thinking about traffic, I'm thinking about the movies. People, please go see the movie for his sake. Yeah, seriously, go see this movie. Come on. In this film, you play a super fan of Nicholas Cage who offers Nicholas Cage the actor in the film A Million Dollars to show up to his fourth birthday party in Spain. Now, in the film, Nick Cage is playing a version of himself as actor Nicolas Cage. You are playing, I think a slight version of yourself as someone who actually is a massive fan of Nicholas Cage. Yeah, I think that because of what my timeline is specifically, I was born in seventy five. We got cable television pretty early, so there were some of his early movies on HBO, and then my father loved to go to the movies. He would take us to the movies a lot. On cable. You would watch Valley Girl, Bertie Racing with the Moon exactly, Rumblefish, Valley Girl in particular, because what do you have. It's kind of like this sort of dyed, reddish fuchia hair. Right. What was crazy about that was, if you think about it now, it was cool to be in the valley and then those crazy delinquents on the other side of the hill in like the whole part of town in Hollywood, like having real lives, those that you know, she was just really slumming it. But yeah, so sort of absorbing these kinds of movies very young. This is a different time. My parents were very young. We were really kind of unsupervised a lot of the time. As far as TV was concerned. There weren't too many rules. It took a lot to send us out of the room. It took them not liking the movie to send you out of the room exactly. There were two movies really that I remember very vividly having like a huge impact on me and both of them because I didn't know what we were going to go see. Often already at a young age, I was like, I want to see this, or I knew what we were going to go and I had an expectation around it. But I remember Peggy's Who Got Married. I had no idea what it is, What could it possibly be with a title like that, had no idea. It was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and the other one was Raising Arizona, and I had no idea. I'd never seen I'd actually like tried to see Blood Simple because the trailer had appeared before some movie I saw when I was a child looked so scary and so visually cool. I like the image of a nine year old pedro thinking, yeah, I want to see the Colin Brothers directorial debut. I'm telling you get me in here, and I remember, like, you know, on drives and stuff like that, because there was this kind of I just remember this sequel. I was really into scary thrillery shit when I was a kid, and I am still now. But I don't know. He was like burying a body out in some Texas field or something like that, and that's the kind of thing a kid wants to say. I guess it was just all the drama that I was after. I don't know. I remember thinking about the trailer did not connect it to when we saw Raising Arizona. And at the start of Raising Arizona, I remember thinking that the whole first few minutes was a trailer for this phenomenal movie. I'd never seen anything like that and had that sort of visual voluptuousness. It was just like, what is this? And then the title blazed in and I was like, Oh, this is the movie. So anyway, there were very impressionable films very very early, with not normal performances from this actor. Yeah, kind of big bombastic pieces, big swings that shouldn't work and work incredibly. They almost work in spite of themselves, like they're so big that they become kind of undeniable. Yeah, but if you see them again, it isn't about these performances being big. It's just completely stylized but also really truthful. I mean, look, I have been kissing this ass so much, I know, but I mean it. I really thought you're gonna say, and I'm tired of it. I'm tired. I'm tired of listening to myself in terms of the earnestness around this issue where I guess my favorite thing in life has always been movies, and then going back and reviewing these performances, I guess I've been able to really plunder what it meant to me as a kid seeing something like that for the first time, because it really holds up. It is everything that I would want to be able to pull off as an actor, is do something completely theatrical and there be so much truth and skill and believability in their performance. I think the thing you're hitting on, though, is that purity that he seems to have in performing. And I want to kind of understand the pure place from which I think you started to love movies. So, as you said, you were born in Chile, your parents, Veronica and Jose were young liberals in their twenties combating a sort of militaristic regime in that country. At the time they flee, they receive asylum in the Venezuelan embassy. Yeah, then they go to Denmark. And then in nineteen seventy six, you're one years old and men you land in San Antonio. I was nine months old when we loved Chile. We were in Denmark like under a year, and we ended up in San Antonio. At what point in your childhood do you begin to understand the origin story of where you came from. It's hard to piece together because I know that my sister and I went back to Chile without our parents because our parents weren't allowed back. I've got an enormous family from both sides, and there visually, the way that I saw it, the presence of what had happened, the fact that my sister and I were the only two out of thirty four first cousins all living in Santiago, Chile, that we were the only two, that we were sort of like these unique members of the family being embraced and taken care of with our parents thousands of miles away, and so I started to develop a real fear of like camouflaged military guards with machine guns that were monitoring. You know, it's not like they were everywhere or anything like that. I'm sure that there was a sort of normalcy of lifestyle that was achieved for all of my cousins that are the ones that are older with me, that basically essentially grew up under a military dictatorship. And yet the visual of that knowing somehow at such a young age that if my parents were there, they would take them away and maybe kill them. The way that that lived, almost like a kind of supernatural presence in my imagination, was so weird. And then we watched so many movies, and I remember seeing Indiana Jones like running across the playing field with Karen Allen in that white dress, and my Karen Allen looked so much like my mother, and so I started to imagine things like that, like my father and mother hand in hand, like running as like they were being shot at a ross, like a dusty sort of airplane field. What do you call well, you said earlier that and being interested in blood simple you were searching for a kind of drama, which is kind of surprising considering where you come from. Yeah, the dramas kind of built in. Yeah, and we're not talking about it either. There was a very dramatic you and your parents aren't talking about Oh no, not at all, nor any of the family members that made it over to us in Texas from Chile. And there was a very dramatic moment in our house when I was a child, because it's close to grab us movie called Missing with Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemon, which deals with the military dictatorship in Chile at the time. It's a true story where an American journalist went missing and was found dead. I remember watching this at home on cable and there was a moment where Sissy spaces character she doesn't make it home before curfew and she just kind of gets trapped in the city. And again of a beautiful, small framed woman that reminded me so much of my mother and had sort of projected these kinds of images of my mother into these characters circumstances, and I just remember completely falling apart when she was in danger and when she was so afraid, and imagining that that could have happened to my mother. I remember having a little bit of a breakdown. What's almost like in the house, no one in the family talked about it. Yeah, and it took a film from Hollywood, yeah, to kind of give language to something no one was giving language too. Yeah. And you know I could sit through anything at the time. And I remember like just starting to cry and being like, I can't, I can't watch this. And I was like, gosh, I don't know. I must have been like eight. You're asking me, like, I know, Yeah, how old was I Maybe eight? That sounds right because by the time you're twelve, your family moves to Orange County. You said, when I was twelve years old, we already enjoyed a very privileged situation, and compared to others, I was quite a spoiled boy. Was that true? Yeah? I was spoiled. You know. Our dad was taken us to the movies all the time. We had cable television. You know. Eventually, once we got into high school years, my mother had found this performing arts program that I had an auditioned for and got into. I didn't like have to work during school. They weren't comfortable with that getting in the way of schoolwork. They didn't buy me a car. I got like the hand me Down Volvo. For sure, I think culturally what it means to spoil your kid in Chili, at least then is a little different. Although certainly I was developing needs from lots of John Hughes movies that I was watching when I was a kid, and my dad would literally be like, who you know being allowed to see everything? You know, there was one movie I wasn't allowed to see, which one, The Breakfast Club. I was dying to see it. I was desperate to see it, and I wasn't allowed. Are the argument being it was rated R? But I was like, but so was First Blood, and you took me to the movies to see that. You know. Essentially, what I came to understand is that my father was like, here are these kids complaining about their parents through the whole movie. Their lives look pretty good to me, so no, you're not seeing that movie. I like the idea that your dad actually wouldn't to go see the movie first, like he screened it for himself. He's like, you know what, this is not a picture for my son. He's gonna start resenting us can develop all these bad happits, Those kinds of ideas like yeah, can't have that. Yeah, we could see the big chill about sort of like you know, his sex and vie whatever, but not kids complaint not. He's like, you're not getting any ideas from this thing. Was it in high school that you started to develop an interest in acting? No, I wanted to. That was why my mom found this performance program, because it was sort of this fantasy that I was sharing with everybody at a very very young age. You know, I knew I wanted to be in movies and started talking about it when I was seven years old. And what did people say when you said that they thought it was cute? I would imagine that maybe I kind of when given the opportunity to get attention, I would seize it and entertain and either annoy or really seduce an audience. As far as parents, friends and stuff were concerned, so maybe they were like, yeah, you know, you definitely need a lot of attention. Nobody seemed surprised. He either needs therapy or he needs acting, and I got both. You know, as soon as we moved to California at the age of I was eleven, turning to immediately was like, Oh, we're getting closer and closer to Hollywood, you know, really that was actually in your head. Absolutely, And so my mother found like a summer program at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. This is before I got to high school. Other friends found this like children's acting program at Laguna Beach, and I auditioned for the kids show at the Luguna Beach Playhouse and got the lead. And it was a play called Wiley and the Harryman, and I was Wiley. You know. So at that point, all right, he's really into this. He doesn't want to swim anymore. Let's just keep him occupied. And they so they didn't mind it at all as far as how much it kept me out of the house, out of the house watching, you know, from kept me from wanting to sit in front of the TV all day, which I do know because I'm an adult and I got what I wanted. You're that kids, if you grow up, you can just sit around and watch yourself on TV. Oh sorry, he didn't mention that he only watches things that he's in or things that he auditioned for it, and he didn't get exactly over and over and over again. I'm not going to go down that list. It's too that's for sure the day that changed you, as I understand it, senior year of high school, a friend of your mothers gives you tickets to Angels in America downtown Los Angeles at the Mark Taper, Yeah before Broadway. Walk me through that day that performance. Basically, my mother's friend said she had theater tickets to something that started at three in the afternoon and ended, you know, after ten pm, and didn't have the back for it, like had back issues. And so if I wanted these tickets, I could take a friend and she'd give me a note to get out of school early and drive to to the Taper and see this this play. She didn't know what it was, and neither did I, and I was like, fuck, yeah, get out of school early. It goes get play. Hell yeah. And it was Oscar Eustace's production of Angels in America. I think it's probably one of the twentieth centuries like most important pieces of literature, much less theater, because if you read it on the page, it's as good as a book, you know. And so I saw that with this underdeveloped brain, and it was about everything, and I remember it very vividly, so much so that I haven't really been able to see other versions of it because of how indelibly marked that first experience was what elements in it spoke to you. It just was so fantastic in concept and in drama. I'm sure there were a ton of things that were over my head. It was overtly sexual, it was overtly politically, it was overtly intellectual, it was overtly emotional. And so there was just the vi rural experience of these very well written scenes, for one, and these hyperintellectual speeches and monologues opening each kind of chapter of the play, and the political history of it all. And you know, you started to hear about AIDS before we all hit puberty in my generation, and so little information on that, and I think sex for all of us just seemed so scary. It seems scary to all of us, all my friends, you know what I mean. Like the idea of like, you know, being reckless around sex seemed like it just would have such consequences. At that point, it didn't matter if you were gay or straight. You know, as we were sort of entering into that phase in life, we started to you know, look for saying I have ZEX basically and so it was just dealt with all of these things kind of head on. I didn't know about really coming, I didn't know about the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know enough about McCarthyism and all of these things. So it just kind of blew my brain wide open. But it was also like an incredible production, and the acting was so fierce, and I remember particularly between Harper and the character of Harp, but the Mormon couple and Pryor and Lewis and the way that they had these like simultaneous kinds of fights. I just remember being blown away politically and creatively. This piece spoke to you, and I clearly awoke something in a young eighteen year old version of yourself. I also remember around this time like the kinds of impression that certain things made with movies as well. I remember seeing sexualizing videotape and this four character piece and just sort of getting into my system. I remember a teacher doing into sakashenas for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow was enough, and it literally just completely laying me out in terms of how dramatically effective these things were in that particularular form that play that movie. But also like what you were learning as a kid. You know, however it happened, it stirred something inside of you that made you think I should go to New York, attend NYU and try to make it go at this, Yeah, you're looking at me almost terrified. While there was just so many other movies that took place in New York that I had seen, and i'd sort of already developed. I'd gone to New York with my father when I was a kid, and I knew and again developed this fantasy of a life that would start in you know, first it was going to be Hollywood, and then I started to understand that real actors came from New York. And I loved it there, really did. When I was a kid, I saw a little Shop of Horrors, you know that the Second Avenue Theater where in ninety three David mammetts Oleano was there, and then Stomp came and never left. Stomp was there and I think is still there as far as I know. And that's where I find a little in awe of the privilege sometimes because I had these sort of disease that I believed that I ended up having access to, and also just believed contrinsically that would happen. I got into NYU. My parents did not want me to go. They nearly didn't let me go because in our house, like you had to do well in school and you had to get into college and then the rest of it, it didn't matter what you were doing. If these things were being accomplished, if these boxes were being checked, then they didn't care if you were fucking or doing your you know. And so but they did let you go, they did. They ended up letting me go to NYU. Yeah, And so I went there rude awakening, which part living there, going from being spoiled kid in Orange County, relatively sheltered kid in Orange County to living in New York and living in those winters and everyone way cooler than you, more talented, better, you know, smarter. Is just sort of like be thinking that you're the ship and then realizing that you are insignificant, you know, and that everyone has as much ambition as you, and just finding space for yourself and the kind of existential sort of confrontation that it was to kind of be in a much much bigger world. We'll be right back after a quick break. As you start to find your footing in New York. Is there any point in college where you started to think, Okay, maybe this acting thing, it can happen for me. I feel comfortable in this. There was a classmate of mine, my friend, this amazing actor named Eugene Bird, who had started very earlies from Philadelphia and he's still, you know, going today. He's fantastic, and he had professional representation. In his generosity, he said, I think you should meet my manager. I think you're really good. And I met as manager. So before I ended up graduating NYU, I was being sent on auditions because I had professional representation and to me, so that left me under the impression that was just going to happen, Like immediately, you do get two quick breaks, don't you. Well, you know, one of the things that happened while I was still in school, I went to an open call for a movie called Primal Fear, got called back for it, called back for it again, and screen tested for it for the end Norton role. Yeah. I think it was something that Leonardo DiCaprio was going to do. And then that didn't happen, so they started looking and it was like the big sought after role I didn't get it. It left me with the impression that, while being heartbroken over that, I'll get the next one. Of course I did not, and then I did not, and then I did not, and then I did not until you got the role on Buffy. I did get a part on Buffy, which was incredibly exciting to me. It was the first episode of the fourth season, like one scene and I got killed, and I couldn't have been more excited about it. So you have representation, Yeah, you're twenty two, twenty three, Yeah, agent manager, I have a couple of parts and something that got my sag. I got your sag. You know. Well, so you had some footing. Oh yeah, yeah, I thought, so, how does a twenty three year old you make sense of your mom's passing at that age? It was obviously very traumatic, and the circumstance of it is one that because she died in Chile, it means the services are immediate. They don't embalm. So it was it was getting the news and then getting on a plane and flying overnight to Santiago to go to a funeral. So you take a plane from New York from LA I was in Los Angeles when I found out because I'd been testing for a pilot called Dark Angel, which was a really big deal at the time because it was sort of the first thing that James Cameron's name was attached to after Titanic, and it was like a supporting role. It was like, you know, number four on the call sheet for which again was going to be the thing that was going to change my life. Instead, your life changes in a completely different way. Yeah, on that plane ride, what's going through your head? You know? I can't say I know. I remember that there was a man sitting next to me. He didn't know what was going on, but a travel is often a pretty hostile experience. I just remember that there was a man sitting next to me. He was just kind of protective in a way. He could see that I was obviously going through something, and I remember, I don't know, I don't know. Maybe the stewardess was like, I wasn't very responsive or something, and she wasn't like being sensitive to something that was pretty obviously going on. And he kind of answered for me, and he was a complete stranger. He was like, he said he doesn't want you know, he said he doesn't want it. And I just can remember that and obviously didn't sleep, but it's an overnight flight, and so then you go and it was summer in Chile as well, so it's very beautiful out and it's a very beautiful day, and none of that seemed to coincide very well with what was happening, and so I remember being an unbelievable thing to get through. To be honest with you, what do you mean by unbelievable. I just loved her so much, and she's just kind of the you know, love of my life in a way. And the world doesn't stop and the sun doesn't stop shining, and it was meant to, you know, emotionally. It was hard for me to register, just to comprehend that you could be in a car going to a cremation service and see a family kind of like playing in the yard experiencing something so drastically different right in front of you, that other people could be experiencing joy, not even mildly, you know, like a beautiful summer day. And I remember that more than anything. And everything stopped, and I was very resentful that nothing stopped. That's kind of the most unnerving part of people dying in your life, which is that they mean so much. In your case, she meant everything, and yet the world continues on. You know. I had a hard time with that. Part of carrying on was wanting to get work, and um, yet it seemed so absurd to feel preoccupied by an audition for maybe a television show or something like that, or a beer commercial. It felt silly in contrast to yeah, what had happened. Yeah, it was just too It seemed too ridiculous. And I did. I did, kind of because I was kind of the plan was to stick it out in Los Angeles and having gotten my Buffy and like a theater award, you know, and I was like, oh, well, it's going really good for me in LA. I'll stay. But I think I understood that I didn't feel like it was it's not it's not I love LA, but it isn't necessarily almost nurture environment. You know. It can be nurturing in terms of like going to the beach and going hiking and shit like that, but emotionally it's a challenge, I think for everybody often, and so I understood pretty clearly that I wouldn't. I don't know that I was in jeopardy of not being able to process this, so I moved back to New York. You throw yourself into it. Yeah, the original goal was to go out there and to do theater and to be a real actor and everything like that, and so I must make meaning out of my life. Big mistake, A big mistake. New York is like, really, you're back? Yeah? And what back to? Back to the restaurant kid? Because I had graduated from in my yew and I had spent a really brutal year after my graduation waiting tables and not getting anything, and then being convinced to get out to LA and to give it a shot out there and getting you know, a sag job and testing for a pilot, etc. So when I went back to New York, you know, no matter what it is, whenever it comes down, I wouldn't want to dissuade anybody from being romantic about their lives or their goals. But it wasn't a very practical thing to do, and it felt like a really huge detour because I got dropped by my agents and I couldn't get arrested, and then nine to eleven happened, and it was just a really crazy, crazy, crazy time. You said once in an interview. I had to let go of so many ideas I had about what the pursuit of this career was going to be. It's a child's fantasy. There were opportunities. A close call started early for me, but it didn't pan out. You find yourself suddenly in your mid thirties and can't live off the next off Broadway show. Yeah, how did you keep going when nothing was working out? I was a waiter, a bad one. But how I got through it was friends and family. Really, I don't want to be too sentimental, but you know, my sister was there to bail me out of anything. She lived in New York for some of that, and I guess as an adult you develop your own family, which I had to do, and very very very very close relationships. There was just always somebody to bail me out and cheer me on, and so I don't really know, It's sort of like there was always just a little something to keep you going. I got to play. I remember losing my representation and there was an audition that had been scheduled before I got dropped, and I think the only reason that I had been submitted for it was because the character's first name was Pascal and it was a world premiere of a play at the Merrimack Repertory Theater in Lowell, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. And I was like, well, when you got that sort of brutal phone call from the agent saying that we are no longer going to represent you, and you say, what about that appointment on Thursday? Do I still go? And they're like yeah, sure, So I went and I got that part, and I went to Lowell, Massachusetts to do this play. I think it was called Fallen. This incredible actress named Monique Fowler was in the play, and I don't know, we just became friends. She realized what my situation was and was like, I'll introduce you to my agent. I met him and went to an excellent, smaller kind of boutique agency, and that sort of got the ball rolling in terms of regional theater. I think the next thing was a play in Washington, d C. At the Shakespeare Theater Company, and then a tiny theater in Cape Cod and I really started to do the regional thing. Went out to Oregon, did Massachusetts quite a few times, did DC quite a few times. So it was starting to come together piece by piece, yeah, piece play piece in terms of like very far away, you know, outside of the radar professional work, which again started to feel really important to me as far as these were big exciting wins. Also, I didn't have any experience in classical training and get cast in a production of a Hamlet or Troy Listen Cressida, and you know, sort of turned this professional environment into training grounds and that was cool. And then I got my first play in New York, an off Broadway premiere of Annilo Cruise play called The Beauty of the Father, And this was the first play produced in New York after he had just won the Pulitzer for an in the Tropics. Really big deal. Some nobody named Oscar Isaac was one of the other leads, and that got things sort of going within the off Broadway community a little bit. Took a long time to years. I'd gotten back to New York in August of one, went into rehearsals for that play in the winter of oh five, and those years in between felt like a lifetime. And even from five leading up to Game at Thrones in twenty fourteen, You're putting it together piece by piece, somehow remaining undeterred by what I'm sure was an immense amount of failure and rejection, a long time front of yours and a great actor Sarah Paulson set of you. He has a rather righteous sense of self. When I look back at it now, I do know there was always this voice deep down inside of him that said, someday he was going to do what he wanted to do in the manner in which he wanted to do it. I wish she had told me that. She told The New York Times that because in the meantime she was like giving me her per diem cash to help me buy groceries. She bailed me out of so many things I can't tell you she made she very soon after my mother had passed. I didn't have a car in LA and she made her younger sister give me her car. I think that her sister had an alternative. But basically, those kinds of life saving moments, maybe that is the thing that unconsciously does kind of sort of keep you going, This sort of sense of stuff that she was able to identify. I had a really hard time identifying that you yourself. Yeah, for sure, what it started to feel like as you get older and start to get into your thirties and you're still doing this, and you're still going on auditions and everything, and you're not developed other skills. If you're me, I started to think, maybe it's too late to develop other skills. It's completely too late for me to develop other skills. And so it started to feel like a kind of ruthlessly practical way of living your life because it was what you knew how to do. I knew how to go on auditions. It was always just enough, you know, and there would be good months, bad months, good year, bad year, and eventually it just started to become a little bit more consistent. I've definitely felt it was sort of kind of a ceiling for me in New York that I wasn't really graduating from as far as the theater community was concerned. There were two plays that I was up for that I didn't get that would have been jobs through the winter of two thousand ten going into eleven. One was a revival of Angels in America at the Signature Theater, directed by Michael Gray, and they just didn't know where to put me in that. And then the other was I think they were moving a Merchant of Venice from the Park to Broadway didn't get either part, which meant that I was available for pilot season. I just started to throw my focus towards that in a really, really practical way, and again the dream sort of became maybe getting a regular gig on a series that could help pay the rent. The pilot season works out, you get a bunch of bit parts and episodic stuff and a whole bunch of shows. As we leave, I want to set with a couple of things when you get the game at their own role. I think somewhere in the middle of shooting, you're in Belfast, sitting in the Great Hall of the Red, keep watching this big enormous set around. You come alive and activate and you are part of it. When you're sitting there looking at the place you've landed, after all you had to go through to get to that moment, How do you say about that now? It's definitely like one of the best days I've ever had period period. Yeah, the set was beautiful, so many of the main players were there. I was sitting down instead of like it is key, instead of hanging from a cliffer or or you know, running or in the elements. You know what I said, you're sitting down and you have a view of everything from where I was sitting, all of the background players in their costumes. It was wonderful. It was wonderful. I definitely had to let go of expectations like that, really, you know, of that dream you had as a kid, Yeah, of having a job of that caliber, because again, like I say, like getting one of the Law in Order episodes, at the time, it felt like a really huge win. You know, the dream was sort of happening, and so the size of it just had just been so adjusted over the years. When I was a child, I dreamed of sitting in a chair on a show, in a scene like that, playing a part like that. I remember being kind of really triggered by the audition process of Game of Thrones because I hadn't made myself totally invulnerable to the desire for a role that could prove successful. But I had definitely created sort of a healthier expectation around work, and when that started to be challenged again, it really scared me. I was like, oh, gosh, I doesn't feel safe to want something as much as I want this, you know, I had learned that that's very painful because you had been disappointed too often. So we're starting in primal fear at the age of nineteen, and I'm like thirty eight at this point, and primal fear wasn't the only one you know, or many in between close calls and so being able to sit there and being like, gee, this I got this part. I'm doing this part. Yeah, it was a moment I really enjoyed, to say the least. It's like you had this childhood dream. The dream worked out a little bit and very quickly in your early twenties. Then the world kind of came crashing down on you, and it made you reset your expectations, and by the time you're in your early forties, you're thinking it's just too dangerous emotionally to want something again. Yeah, but to bring it full circle, You've done so much in the last five years that childhood dream has been actualized. And yet I'm curious for you as we leave. Did you get what you wanted? Yeah? More than what I wanted. I think that you have to maintain a relationship to the innocence of your imagination and also parent it with reality and keep yourself in check, because nothing is ever enough if you aren't in a relationship to truth, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. I was going to ask you, Yeah, what is truth? What is truth to you at this point you're forty seven now, or at the very least, what the hell is your truth? Be good to yourself and be good to people. If you want to do any good, you've got to be good, and that's going to start with yourself and those that are important to you. And I guess I would say that relationships and having good relationships is more important to me than everything that's been going on for the last five years. And I know that that's going to be the sustaining thing, so that's what I wanted. So it's it's a matter of staying in relationship to that and also to how fucking exciting it is for Nicholas Cage to be your scene partner in the first day work, you know, having been flown out of the Los Angeles Apocalypse of the bed of like that it would of twenty twenty, and you know, in starting a shoot day in Debrevnik, Croatia, where your head was split open in Game of Thrones, like spitting distance from the arena where I shot that fight really pinched me kind of shit. It's always a challenge to remind yourself to kind of pinch yourself and to be like, oh, you know, things are kind of working out. And early on in this conversation, you said you were a little confused by by the fact that you and your sister were two of thirty four members of your family to remain in America at that time when you came here. I'm thinking about that now because you have this quote here. You said, I can't even imagine everything my parents had to go through when they escape from Chile, and that has left me with an inheritance of guilt that perhaps has determined the way in which my brothers and I navigate the world. That guilt that anyone who grows up with some privilege has, whether your parents fleet a you know, dictatorship or not, do you still carry that or are you now at this point in your life able to let it go. We carry it, you know, it's a it's a generational thing. I think in spite of what my parents went through, they were also very lucky. I think that they carry the guilt of the humble beginnings of their parents. It's very contradictory because I feel like they didn't set any limitations, because both my sisters and my brother have been kind of uncompromising in terms of what their pursuits are and how important their relationships are, and out of the four of us, maybe they would be very hurt to hear this. I'm so attached to them, like I cling to them so much, which for I guess obvious reasons. I wonder what it is about my parents that made us feel such permission to be and do what we want, And so I guess for that not to have the clearest shape, the most solid shape to just put in front of myself makes me It isn't guilt necessarily, but it is just sort of, you know, some kind of I don't know, some sort of like duty. Don't you know, be grateful. I don't know, you know, I wish I could, I wouldn't. This isn't necessarily something that i've I've I've kind of like figured out what were you thinking? I was just thinking about the mystery of it in terms of how they're still sort of making sense of things and putting it all together and making shape of it so that you can kind of see it and just try to understand all of the events that have led to me just sitting in front of you and talking about it. I don't really know how to sit together or what it what it actually means. And I guess what I was just doing now is just kind of staring blankly at the mystery of what does it all mean? Oh God, this is the end, right, We've got to You've got to stop me. I'm just gonna stop talking so that I don't continue too hard on yourself. I know, God, I hear that a lot. Maybe that's part that's a goal. Something's hard on yourself. I don't know why your parents gave you the permission they did to be the creative person that you've become. But I think I speak for many people listening that I'm glad that they gave you that permission, and I'm grateful you've made good use of it. Thank you, Sam, Are you okay? I am feeling vulnerable, but it's that's that's a good thing. Thank you for being vulnerable. Welcome Pedro, lovely Me, love me, say thank you, and that's our show. Special thanks to the team's at Anonymous Content Relevant pr lions Gate, and of course Pedro Pascal. His latest film, The unbearable weight of massive Talent is now available in theaters across the country. To learn more about Pedro and his work, visit our show notes at talk easy pod dot com. On our site, you'll find some of my favorite conversations with people like Tessa Thompson, Dave to Burn, Matthew McConaughey, Kate Blanchette, Questlove, Edward Norton, Coleman Domingo, jannic Sobravo, Laura Dern, Hasan Minhaje, and Janelle Monet. To hear those and more, Pushkin Podcasts listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, at talk easypod. If you'd like to purchase one of our mugs they come in cream or navy, you can do so at talk easypod dot com slash shop. If you want to support us in other ways, the best thing you can do is share the show with the friend, the family member, anyone that you think may like the work we do here. If that sounds like too much, you can also just leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, wherever you like to listen. After all these years of making a podcast that is still the best way for new people to find the show as always, Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Jannick Sabravo. Our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden. Today's talk was edited by Clarice Gavara and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Music by Dylan Peck, illustrations by Christia Chanoy, Photographs by Julius Chow, Video and graphics by Ian Chang, Derek gaberzach Ian Jones, Ethan Seneca and Laila Register. Special thanks to Patrice Lee, Kaylin Ung and shiloh'fagan. I'd also like to thank the team at Pushkin Industries, Justin Richmond, Julia Barton, John Schnars, Karrie Brodie, David Glover, Heather Faine, mil LaBelle, Eric Sandler, Nicolemarano, Maggie Taylor, Morgan Rattner, Maya Kanig, Carly Migliori, Jason Gambrell, Malcolm Gladwell, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm San Fragoso, thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with author Jennifer Egan. Until time, stay safe, and so on,