Pedro Pascal has been around for a while now, having broken out in Game of Thrones season four, back when Game of Thrones was still beloved. That was more than half a decade ago, it’s not like Pedro Pascal is new, but it feels like this year is something of a Pedro Pascal renaissance, thanks to his role in The Mandalorian and his upcoming role in Wonder Woman 1984, sure to be one of the biggest movies of the year. Between those two things, Pascal is going to be part of two of the biggest pop culture moments of 2020. Oh, did you think The Mandalorian is some 2019 sh-t? Well Disney just announced season two will air in October (this time they’re getting Baby Yoda on the right side of holiday merchandising), so The Mandalorian season two will be our annual Star Wars thing to look forward to this year.
I still have questions about how often it was actually Pascal under the helmet in The Mandalorian, and I wonder if season two will do anything to make it clear more often that it is Pascal in the armor; we know from Bryce Dallas Howard there is at least one whole episode of season one in which Pascal was absent. (Or they could go the other way and start billing his doubles, Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder, higher in the cast.) Regardless of when it is or is not Pascal in the armor, The Mandalorian is by far the most popular thing Star Wars has done since The Force Awakens, and it may well indeed be the future of Star Wars, as Disney is considering spin-offs to add to its streaming collection. They say they’re still developing feature films, but the “emphasis will be on Disney+ for the next few years”. That 2022 Star Wars movie is not getting made, I’m calling it now.
As for Pascal, here’s a fun footnote for his upcoming Wonder Woman summer. Back in 2011, NBC attempted to reboot Wonder Woman as a television show starring Adrianne Palicki. Pascal was cast in that pilot as Ed Indelicato, a cop who sometimes works with Diana. But the pilot was reportedly TERRIBLE, and NBC shelved it and the show did not go to series. That set Pascal free to audition for Game of Thrones a few years later, and then at the other end of the 2010s, he’s cast as the main villain in a much-hyped Wonder Woman movie. This is an interesting case of Hollywood Sliding Doors. What would Pedro Pascal’s career be today if he’d been stuck on a network superhero show for years? Maybe not terrible, after all, superhero shows have made the careers of guys like Stephen Amell and Grant Gustin. But then, would Pascal have been the Viper? Or the Mandalorian? Probably not. And I bet if you asked him, he’d choose the uncertainty of auditioning over the security of a network show, given how it worked out for him.
Attached - Pedro Pascal leaving the gym yesterday in LA.
