Between The Last of Us and The Mandalorian and the upcoming Strange Way of Life, Pedro Pascal is the man of the hour. So, it’s fitting that Pedro, 48, would appear at the 2023 Met Gala benefiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. He did more than appear — he served. The internet’s daddy rocked a red trenchcoat, black boots, black shorts, and a black shirt that brought all the sex appeal to the May 1 event. It was giving Kraftwerk‘s Mensch Maschine / Man Machine.
Pedro’s success has been a long time coming. As Dave Holmes’ profile for Esquire notes, he was a struggling actor in his twenties and thirties before this new level of fame. He had his short arc in Game of Thrones, which included a mind-blowingly death. He appeared on Netflix’s early show, Narcos, but it wasn’t until he donned The Mandalorian helm that his star really rose. His role as Joel in The Last of Us, the HBO adaptation of the hit video game, cemented his place as a star.
“I died so many deaths,” he said in the Esquire piece. “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.”
“He’s talked about this publicly,” says Sarah Paulson, Pedro’s close friend (who appeared alongside him in a Saturday Night Live sketch about their “daddy”/”mommy” appeal”), “but 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.” His persistence in his career ultimately paid off, with him reaching his breakthrough at a time when Hollywood would generally say it was time for the curtain to fall.
“I had a moment of thinking, You’re in your forties, and you don’t own a home? Grow up. But I’m relinquishing expectations around what it is to be middle-aged and what it means to be fully grown up,” Pedro also told Dave Holmes. “Why am I trying to force a square shape into a triangle?”
Pedro will appear in Strange Way of Life, portraying a rancher who visits an old friend, a sheriff played by Ethan Hawke. “The strange way of life referred in the title alludes to the famous fado [mournful Portuguese song] by Amalia Rodrigues, whose lyrics suggest that there is no stranger existence than the one that is lived by turning your back on your own desires,” said director Pedro Almodóvar in press materials for the film, per Polygon.