Aww! Pedro Pascal Says ‘The Mandalorian’ Completely ‘Changed My Life’

From bit parts to starring roles. Pedro Pascal spent nearly two decades taking one-off acting gigs in film and television before he rose to prominence for his role on Game of Thrones in 2014.

The Chile native joined the cast of the fantasy drama in season 4 as Oberyn Martell.

“It was a dream, you know,” Pascal said of his tenure on the HBO series during an April 2022 interview with British GQ. “It was this great role, at the height of the show’s popularity, a perfectly written season, a perfectly written role — go in, shoot for 10 weeks, leave.”

The Wonder Woman 1984 actor added: “Nobody got a chance to be sick of me. I had comfortable costumes, which is a miracle. I didn’t have a heavy wig. I might have been the luckiest human to have passed through that show.”

GoT showrunner David Benioff revealed during an October 2020 Variety interview that Pascal’s audition was shot on an iPhone and “looked like s—t.” He told the outlet at the time: “The whole thing was very amateurish. Except for the performance, which was intense and believable and just right.”

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Pascal’s star continued to rise when he was cast as DEA agent Javier Peña on the Netflix series Narcos in 2015. On the silver screen, he appeared in films including Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017), Triple Frontier (2019) and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022), which he costarred in with Nicolas Cage. Working with the National Treasure star served as a source of inspiration for Pascal.

“There was almost something about, I don’t know, reawakening the things that you care about and why you got into it in the first place, because he’s still challenging himself, he’s super prepared, he’s coming up with new ideas, and honestly, it was an incredible challenge to rise to. But it was mostly a really beautiful inspiration and a reminder of why I had this fantasy to start with,” the Bubble actor said during an April 2022 appearance on BroBible’s “Post-Credit Podcast.”

In addition to expanding his film resume, Pascal began starring in the Disney+ Star Wars series The Mandalorian in 2019. In 2023, he returned to HBO, portraying Joel in the post-apocalyptic drama The Last of Us, based on the video game of the same name.

During a January 2023 interview with Entertainment Weekly, the Book of Boba Fett actor said he had “such a great time” making season 1 of the series that he didn’t dare speculate about future installments.

“You almost feel like if you have a really good experience, it’s asking for too much that it’d be well received or that experience be translated to an audience, but that’s the intention and what our whole want is more than anything,” he told the outlet.

Scroll through to see Pascal through the years:

The Adjustment Bureau actor took small roles, appearing in television shows including Good vs. Evil and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

Pascal made appearances on series including Law & Order, Nurse Jackie and The Good Wife. 

The Bloodsucking Bastards actor rose to prominence after his arc on season 4 of Game of Thrones. 

“Once we saw the entire season, there was no doubt Pedro was going to be a star. I thought he deserved more recognition, frankly,” Benioff told Variety in October 2020. 

Pascal began portraying real-life DEA agent Peña on Narcos. 

The Prospect actor appeared in Kingsman: The Golden Circle alongside A-listers including Colin Firth, Elton John and Halle Berry.

During a September 2017 appearance on the Today show, Pascal called the experience “very surreal.” 

Pascal began portraying the titular character in The Mandalorian.

The NYU Tisch School of the Arts alum starred in the action comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent alongside Cage. 

The Great Wall actor began starring in The Last of Us alongside fellow GoT alum Bella Ramsey. Although the costars didn’t have scenes together in the fantasy series, their characters were both fan-favorites. 

“I feel like it made us come from a family without knowing each other already,” Pascal told Entertainment Weekly of his bond with Ramsey in January 2023. “To have two characters that the fans liked make their entrance and make their exit is parallel for the both of us and a kind of bonding thing before we even got a chance to bond.”

Pascal attended the 95th annual Academy Awards in March to present Best Animated Short and Best Documentary Short. He walked the red carpet in a Zegna suit with older sister Javiera Balmaceda. His sibling is Amazon Studios’ head of local originals for Latin America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. She was attending in support of Argentina, 1985, a Best International Film nominee.

Pascal joined his The Mandalorian costars at PaleyFest on March 31, where he gushed about his role on the Disney+ series.

“[The show] has changed my life completely. I’ve told the story many times … but meeting both Jon [Favreau] and Dave [Filoni] in this room with wall-to-wall illustrations [of] the entire first season. And, seeing the Child, Baby Grogu, and knowing that ‘Oh, people are going to die. They’re going to love this,’” he gushed during the Paley Center for Media event, which Us Weekly attended. “Also I grew up [when] Swingers came out and I [saw] Jon as an actor and then saw Swingers and sort of understood what happens if somebody takes license and starts to tell their stories. And it just hasn’t stopped since then. Whether [it’s] indie films or a comedy or incredible world-building of stories like Star Wars, I basically have seen them do exactly what I know that they set to do, and do it for the people that love the stories [as] much as they do.”