Pushkin. This is Talk Easy. I'm Stanfordgoso. Welcome to the show today. I'm joined by actor Bedro Pascal. I taped this conversation with Bedro last summer around the release of a film called The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent starring Nicholas Cage. He now has a new hit TV series, The Last of Us, currently available to stream on HBO. New episodes of that program air every Sunday. If you are like most people in America or around the world, you have probably been watching this show. I am just starting to catch up now. It is fantastic. You may have also seen Pascal hosting SNL earlier this month. If I had any say in the matter, and I want to be clear, I obviously don't, but if I did, I would immediately green light a franchise around the Protective Mother character he played. If you haven't seen it, just google Protective Mother SNL sketch. It's one of my favorite pieces that they've done in recent memory. There's one more thing, of course, come the top of March. I think it's March first. Pedro will reprise the titular role in the Mandalorian co created by John Favreau. You can stream new episodes of The Mandalorian on Disney Plus beginning March first. With that, a bit of housekeeping before we dive in the Pedro. Next week, on Friday, February twenty fourth, we'll be taping a live episode of Talk Easy as part of on AirFest in Brooklyn, New York, sitting with the brilliant novelist Minjin Lee. She's the author of books like Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, which was a finalist for the National Book Award back in twenty seventeen. It was then turned into a series for Apple last year. You can join us for the live show at the White Hotel in New York, where there will also be other live tapings of shows you may like, including Not Lost on Being and Slow Burn Roe v. Wade. To get tickets, visit on AirFest dot com. That's onairfest dot Com. The festival runs from the twenty fourth through the twenty fifth of this month. I am so looking forward to this conversation with Minjin Lee. She's one of my favorite writers we have today, whether it's in the form of fiction or nonfiction. She's also just a great thinker and talker. She was previously an attorney, and I think that has something to do with it. I think it's going to be a great episode of the show. If you want to come to the White Hotel in Brooklyn and watch it live, be sure to visit on AirFest dot com. For today, we're going to return to our talk with Padro Pascal. We start the conversation around his role in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a project that in many ways delivered Padro back to the beginning growing up in Orange County, where he first fell in love with movies and acting, and of course, Nicholas Cage. I hope you enjoy see how 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 and traffic right historically, they love 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, ye know, Okayody to get to We'll have it to the one ten. You know, when 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 I 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 planted anymore. I'm going to go to 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 say actors are narcissists and they're not. They're just not. They're just that 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 Nicolas Cage, the actor in the film, a million dollars to show up to his fortieth birthday party in Spain. Now, in the film, Nick Cage is playing a version of himself as actor Nicholas 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 cool part of town in Hollywood, like having real lives, those were 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, I 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 tried to see Blood Simple because the trailer had appeared before some movie I saw when I was a child, and it looked so scary and so visually cool. I like the image of a nine year old Pedro thinking, yeah, I want to see the Collen 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 am still now. But I don't know. He was 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, they 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 going to 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 ponder 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 he 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 then 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 than 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 plane 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 across 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. 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 its cost 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 sort of a beautiful, small framed woman that reminded me so much of my mother, and I 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 break down. 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 in to. 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 it 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 we yeah, can't have that. Yeah we could see the big chill about sort of like you know, his sex and vife whatever, but not kids complain not He's like, you're not 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 performing arts 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 when I was seven years old. And what do 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 twelve, 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 and Coasta 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 harry Man, 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 um 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, and he didn't get exactly over and over and over again. I'm gonna go down that list. Too long. It's too fucking long, that's for sure. The day that changed you, as I understand it. Senior year of high school, a friend of your mother's 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 the Taper and see this play. She didn't know what it was, and neither did I, but I was like, fuck, yeah, get out of school early. It goes get a 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 visceral 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 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 consequence as 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 have zex basically, and so it was just dealt with all of these things kind of head on. I didn't know about Roy Cohn, 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 Heart 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 color girls who've considered suicide when the rainbow was enough, and they literally just completely laying me out in terms of how dramatically effective these things were in that particular 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 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 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 fantasies that I believed that I ended up having access to and also just believed intrinsically that would happen. I got into en Yu. 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. These things were being accomplished if these ba as, we're being checked and the 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. Uh, 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 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 freshman year, 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 I 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. We 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 airline 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 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. It's like he said he doesn't want you know, he said he doesn't want it. And I just can remember that. And I 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 being 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. 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 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, too, 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 nurturing 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 M back to? Back to the restaurant kid? Because I had graduated from in my eye, 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 build me out of anything. She lived in New York for some of that, and I us 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 a 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 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 Anilo Cruise play called The Beauty of the Father. And this was the first play producer in New York after he had just won the Pulitzer for Anna and 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 had gotten back to New York in August of one, went into her souls for that play in the winter of five, and those years in between felt like a lifetime. And even from five leading up to Game of 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 in 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 by groceries. She bailed me out of so many things I can't tell you she made she very soon after my motherhood, asked 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 stelf 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 developing other skills. If you're me, 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 there 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 griff 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 in episodics, though, in a whole bunch of shows. As we leave, I want to sit with a couple of things when you get the game at their ownes 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 sit with 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 you know, running or in the elements. You know, 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 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 and 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 a 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 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 on the first day of work, you know, having been flown out of the Los Angeles Apocalypse of the Bead of like that it would of twenty twenty, and you know, and starting a shoot day in Debrovnik, 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 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 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. 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 them 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 would. This isn'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 there's 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 piece it together or 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 going to 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. You're welcome. Pedro love to meet you too. Sam. Thank you, and that's our show. If you enjoy today's episode, be sure to give us five stars on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you like to listen to hear more conversations like the one you just heard. I'd recommend our talks with Tessa Thompson, Nick Offerman, Kate Blanchette, Jennic Sobravo, Janelle Monet, Ethan Hawk, and Jonathan Major's For those and more Pushkin Podcasts listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. I also want to give us special thanks today to the team's and anonymous content and relevant pr To learn more about Babro's new work on HBO's The Last of Us, his latest performance on Saturday Night Live, and his most recent turn in the newest season of The Mandalorian, visit our show notes at talk easypod dot com. Also on the website will include information about our live show at on our fest. Next week, we'll be sitting with award winning and best selling author Min Jin Lee. If you want to check that out, It's on Friday, February twenty fourth, three pm at the White Hotel in Brooklyn, New York. As always, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at Talk Easypod. Do you want to support us by purchasing one of our mugs? They come in cream or navy. You can also buy our vinyl record with the inimitable fran Liebowitz. Visit Talk easypod dot com slash shop That's Talk easypod dot Com slash shop. As always, Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Rebak. Our executive producer is Jannick Sobravo. Our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden. Today's Talk was originally edited by Clarisse Gavara and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Music by Dylan Peck, illustrations by Christian Shanoway, photographs by Julius Chew, Video and graphics by Ian Chang, Derek Gaberzaki and Jones, Ethan Seneca and Leila Register. Special thanks Patrise, Lee, Kaylin Ung and Paulina Suarez. I'd also like to thank our team at Pushkin Industries, Justin Richmond, Julia Barton, John Snars, Karrie Brody, David Glover, Heather Fane, Mia LaBelle, Eric Sandler, Nicolemarano, Morgan Rattner, Jordan McMillan, Isabella Navarrez, Maya Kina, Carli mcgliori, Jason Gambrell, Malcolm Gladwell, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Sanfordgo, so thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next Sunday with a new episode. Until that, stay safe and so on.