Climbing steps, as the furor for the series that have him as the protagonist grows, the career of the Chilean actor Pedro Pascal is probably at his highest point. Why is he the ideal fetish actor for content on streaming platforms?
It was Oberyn Martell in “Game of Thrones”Javi Pena in “Narcos” and Din Djarin in “The Mandalorians”. Now he plays Joe Millen in the HBO series “The last of us”.Born in Santiago de Chile, he brought to the screen with enormous success and popularity some of the heroes of the most watched fiction of the last five years. This meteoric stardom is also accompanied by the growing and consolidated mass of content, in its serial format, on the different platforms.
The video game adaptation “The Last of Us”carried out by the showrunners Craig Mzin and Neil Druckmann for HBO, it put a new stepping stone in Pascal’s career. His physiognomic and performative work continues to be a hallmark of his participation and is an essential point in the interpretive construction of Joel, the main character in the latest saga of “zombies”.
Currently, he is considered the most relevant Latino actor in audiovisual productions. Beyond questionable film participations such as his role as the villain Maxwell Lord in the film “Wonder Woman 1984” or his work in “The big Wall”the artist, with a versatile interpretation, was part of successful comedies such as “Kingsman: the golden circle”, “The Bubble” and “The Umbearable Weight of Massive Talent”.
Born with the name of Jose Pedro Balmaceda Pascal, in 1975, he lived less than a year in his native Chile. His mother Veronica Pascal Ureta and his father Jose Balmaceda Riera They were opponents of the Pinochet regime, militants of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) and distant relatives of the ousted former president Salvador Allende. Shortly after the birth of his son, the Balmaceda Pascal family obtained political asylum in Denmark.
In the 1980s, the exiled Chilean family immigrated to the Texas state of San Antonio and then to California. At that time Pedro Pascal decided quit competitive swimming and go to the theater. In 1993, she moved to New York to study drama at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
His professional career began in television series from a very young age. At first his appearances in bowling and in various castings appeared with his legal name, Pedro Balmaceda. But due to the difficulty in pronouncing that last name, he changed it to Pedro Pascal.
Although it could also be a departure from his father: Dr. Balmaceda Riera, a doctor dedicated to fertility treatments, got involved in a dark episode of frozen embryos without permission at the clinic he ran with two other professionals, and returned to Chile, before his judicial process was finalized. The doctor would return to the United States only in 2022, to declare himself guilty of tax evasion, and only released with the payment of a bond of 750 thousand dollars.
That time of cameos and appearances, before the Netflix furor, led Pascal to be part of legendary television series such as Law & Order, NYPD Blue and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. His career took color with his participation in The Mentalist, in the role of Marcus Pike. Of course, the most valuable card was obtained when David Benioff, showrunner of Game of Thrones, he received the Chilean’s filmed audition with an iPhone and at that moment he knew that he had found Oberyn Martell. The career of this trans-Andean artist is just beginning and promises many more successes.
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