[COLUMN] Pedro Pascal is Not Over-Exposed, He's Just Seizing the Moment | by Darren Mooney

This year, Pedro Pascal was everywhere – and people noticed.

The Last of Us returned for its second season, with Pascal reprising his role as Joel Miller. Pascal was the star of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the big Marvel Studios release of the year. He was the second lead of Ari Aster’s Eddington and the third lead of Celine Song’s Materialists. He popped up in the 50th anniversary special of Saturday Night Live and carried his own segment of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Freaky Tales, even playing opposite Oakland legend Tom Hanks.

This explosion of Pascal didn’t come out of nowhere. He had also been fairly busy last year as well, taking a modest role in Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls, playing the second lead in The Wild Robot, playing one of the two stand-ins for the absent Maximus (Russell Crowe) in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II and somehow finding time to appear in Nadia Conners’ indie film The Uninvited. He was also originally supposed to appear in Zach Creggers’ Weapons, before the actors’ strike.

Pascal’s schedule shows no sign of clearing up. Next year, he is anchoring two blockbusters. He is the star of The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first theatrical Star Wars release since The Rise of Skywalker. He will also reprise his role as Reed Richards in Avengers: Doomsday, where he will be playing the foil to the villainous Victor Von Doom (Robert Downey Jr.) and will reportedly lead the eponymous team. He also stepped in to replace Joaquin Phoenix in Todd Haynes’ De Noche.

Pascal seems to have done something very difficult in modern Hollywood. He seems to have made the leap from television star to movie star. The actor broke out with a trio of beloved and memorable television performances: Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones, Din Djarin in The Mandalorian, Joel Miller in The Last of Us. His success is all the more notable for coming late in life, with Pascal only breaking out in his 40s. There is no denying: Pedro Pascal is a very busy man.

In the modern internet age, this has attracted no small amount of attention and derision. Observers have wondered whether there is – or will be – “Pedro Pascal fatigue.” Commentators have been very weird about Pascal’s press. Pedro Pascal’s personal life has been subject to much gossip and speculation. Much like Sydney Sweeney, another hard-working performer in contemporary Hollywood, it feels like everybody is being a little weird about Pascal.

To be fair, celebrities can be over-exposed. Hollywood has a history of trying to foist movie stars upon an unsuspecting and often unwilling population. There was a period over half a decade when the movie-going public was subjected to an unrelenting effort to make Ryan Reynolds a star in a barrage of terrible-to-mediocre films: X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Proposal, Green Lantern, The Change-Up, Safe House, R.I.P.D. The audience said “no”, but the audience didn’t get a choice.

Because movie star quality is not something that can be easily quantified – and maybe because studios believe they can make a movie star through force of will – this over-exposure tends to happen with handsome white guys. Sam Worthington headlined Terminator Salvation, Clash of the Titans and Sabotage in a five-year window. Jai Courtney bounced from Jack Reacher to A Good Day to Die Hard to I, Frankenstein to the Divergent franchise to Terminator Genisys to Suicide Squad.

However, this is very different from what is happening with Pedro Pascal. Quite pointedly, Pascal does not seem to be actively pursuing movie franchises and blockbuster fare, with the notable exception of Fantastic Four, which leads into the two upcoming Avengers movies. Even The Mandalorian and Grogu is spinning out of his television work. The other big exception is Gladiator II, but that film provided the actor the opportunity to work with legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott.

In contrast, Pascal has largely chosen smaller and more interesting roles. Eddington and Materialists are both A24 films. Pascal has chosen to leverage his fame to work with a murderer’s row of extremely talented auteurs: Ridley Scott, Ethan Coen, Ari Aster, Celine Song, Todd Haynes. If nothing else, Pascal’s choices reflect good taste and an obvious affection for the history of the medium in which he is working. Pascal is using his fame to work with established and emerging talent.

More to the point, Pascal seems to be using his fame judiciously. His choices seem to be made with the understanding that he has a lot of cultural cachet at this precise moment due to his starring work on The Last of Us, Fantastic Four and The Mandalorian, and so his presence in an independent movie means a lot to that film. For example, Pascal’s involvement in De Noche seems like it would be enough to singlehandedly revive that project. This is an actor using star power for good.

Indeed, there is something very strategic in the choices that Pascal is making, as if the actor is trying to maximize his efficacy. Despite being credited in the marketing as the co-lead, Pascal was only in a handful of episodes of the second season of The Last of Us. Pascal is technically the second lead of Eddington, but is largely absent from the film’s final hour. Pascal is the third lead in Materialists, but his character vanishes from the final act. Pascal is just one strand of Freaky Tales.

This allows Pascal to spread the love, as it were, to appear in multiple projects in a relatively short amount of time. However, these are tactical choices. Pascal is deployed very cannily in each of these films. Pascal is prominent enough in Eddington, Materialists and Freaky Tales that it is entirely reasonable to include his name and face on the poster. While Pascal might not be enough to get these movies greenlit alone, he adds real value in pitching these films to audiences and investors.

Freaky Tales got lost in the chaos at Lionsgate and Eddington was always going to be a hard sell, but Pascal undoubtedly helped co-stars Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans to push Materialists to a more-than-healthy $85m worldwide on a $20m budget. It is a very conscious effort on Pascal’s part to use his star wattage to help make and sell movies that aren’t always welcome in contemporary Hollywood. It is a better use of star power than simply starring in blockbuster after blockbuster.

Pascal is far from the only modern actor to understand this. Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart both leveraged the popularity of the Twilight franchise to work with interesting filmmakers on novel projects. Pattinson enjoyed collaborations with David Cronenberg, while Stewart worked with Olivier Assayas. The pair would then dip their toes back into blockbuster fare – Pattinson with The Batman, Stewart less successfully with Underwater and Charlie’s Angel – to help raise their cachet again.

Among Pascal’s contemporaries, Austin Butler looks to be doing something similar. Butler has enjoyed a string of well-reviewed performances in high-profile blockbusters like Elvis and Dune: Part Two, and instead of using that momentum to attach himself to another franchise or even to chase awards glory, Butler seems to be happy to leverage his popularity to work with filmmakers he respects like Jeff Nichols on The Bikeriders and Darren Aronofsky on Caught Stealing.

This is how movie stardom used to work. Stars used to build up a relationship with audiences and studios by starring in populist blockbusters, and then would use the credit that they had banked to help make interesting films, often with emerging talent or established masters. Tom Cruise hopped from launching a franchise with Mission: Impossible to Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

Back in the day, audiences would follow those movie stars to those more interesting and ambitious projects. Jerry Maguire made $273m worldwide. Magnolia made $48m. Eyes Wide Shut grossed $162m. It doesn’t work that way anymore – The Bikeriders struggled to $36m and Caught Stealing is off to a slow start. Then again, this is the inevitable result of more than a decade of cultural fracking, the destruction of mid-budget movies and movie stars in pursuit of intellectual property.

If the industry is going to return to something close to equilibrium and stability – and the recent (and entirely foreseeable) issues facing the gigantic behemoth blockbusters suggests that it would be prudent to restore equilibrium – then it will be a long and slow process that will involve re-establishing audiences’ trust in actors like Pascal and Butler. Hollywood has to learn how to cultivate stars again, and to help those stars diversify the cultural landscape.

Pedro Pascal is not over-exposed. He is simply doing what any potentially bankable star should do at this point in his career, using his name and recognition to help push a more diverse and more interesting selection of movies than those that tend to work their way through the studio system. It’s endearing to see a performer who cares so much about the industry and the artform that he would use his credibility in such a way. He is stretching himself to cover a gap.