"Pedro Pascal"

0:05Okay, we're really, really late. We gotta start the show. I wanna get right into it. but I really want to tell you something about myself that not a lot of people know. But I know you're waiting. I know you're waiting. We should probably get to the show. It's going to start in any second now, and I can't wait to see who the guest is. I don't know if it's mine or theirs. I don't know, because I'm shooting. I'm looking in the mirror right now, you guys, and I look amazing. I look incredible. I'm wearing a baseball hat. I'm wearing glasses. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, okay, we'll get right to it.

0:36Get right to it, get right to it, get right to it, get right to it. Welcome to SmartList. SmartList.

0:48SmartList.

0:57Will mentioned that he was going to try a couple of new characters today. Oh yeah, he did. Did he talk about some new characters? Is that what he was saying? Make sure they aren't offensive accents, please. Okay. Oh, this guy's... That's sort of stereotypical what? You don't know anything about that guy's story. You don't know anything about that guy's story? Tell us about him. Tell us about him. I, sorry, he. I'm so in... I love talking about my work as an actor and how I got there. Well, this is a great segue because let me tell you what I want to talk about this morning. Yeah, I agree. It is what I want to talk about, too.

1:33Listener, Will and I are fresh off the boat from New York. We do travel by water. We don't like to fly. No, Sean, you'll be quiet. Sean, you will be quiet. You'll be quiet. And we're back from New York, and we went and saw Sean's play. We had the pleasure. The Belasco, sorry, the Belasco. We had the honor of seeing Sean in Goodnight Oscar at the Belasco. And let me tell you about garbage. you can smell it from a mile away but when you actually see it yeah trash when you look at trash it'll pile up it does the flies give it away I used to date that all the time Sean is such a mega talent if you're anywhere near New York City listener do your eyes and ears a favor and your heart quite frankly and your tear ducts and your laugh machine and go see Goodnight Oscar.

2:31Sean, Will and I said it immediately after the standing ovation. No, no, Sean turned around. Sean, Jason was sitting directly in front of me and he turned around and Jason looks at me and he says, Sean's ruined the podcast. He's ruined the podcast. We can no longer, who are we going to make fun of now? Who can we disrespect? Oh, get ready. And he said, how is Sean, he goes and does this every night. And I said, not every night. Yeah, not every night. They couldn't make that deal. No, but honestly, in all seriousness... Monday's and Tuesday's most people on Broadway, they take one night off. I knew Sean was talented.

3:05I think we all know Sean is talented. But when you see him play this character that takes pure acting skill, and then he plays the piano, I knew he was classically trained, but then to see him play seven minutes of Rhapsody in Blue, unaccompanied, on a big-ass Steinway in the middle of a Broadway stage, and bring the entire audience to their feet with wet faces from the crescendo of this play with him playing this piano really does play it. I mean, it's just, and this character they played, I mean, Sean, I'm really, really, really knocked out. Truly. Thank you. Absolutely. The most magical night I've ever had in the theater, and I know what a weird sentence that is, but it's very sweet.

3:49Well, you've had a few magical nights behind some theaters. Behind the theaters. I'm talking about sitting in the chairs. But in the theater. and we that's the theater that's right off Van Nuys anyway that's a different story we'll save that for a different podcast but Sean truly and Jason you and I were not alone in that everybody in that theater felt it it was palpable, it was incredible all of our friends who were there all of whom are actors and everybody going like this character that he created an unbelievable way and what about the star wattage that Sean can crammed into not just our dumbasses.

4:27Steven Spielberg is sitting there, and he's a part investor in the play. He believes in it so much. And boy, was he feeling smart at the end of it. That's really sweet. It was unbelievable. And our buddy Frank Marshall was there. He was just beside himself, also one of the producers of the play. And then just, I mean, everybody. It was unbelievable, Sean. It was incredible. Marty Short, this is my favorite. So I see Marty and Andrea Martin were sitting in front of you, Jay. And so we go to the after party and we're walking over to the table up where we're all sitting. And I go by Marty and Marty's at the bar and there are probably 40 people between him and me.

5:07And he looks and he catches my eye and across everybody he shouts, why don't you have talent like that?

5:17wait another another great line though that will will came up to me at the party afterwards and the first thing will arnett says to me he goes hey i had to get up during the piano part how did it go

5:31oh my god and then and then you wake up to a nomination from the outer critic circle I know, amazing. You guys are so nice. Buckle up. Sean, we love you. We love you. Love you too, guys. Now, let me just say something. It meant the world that you guys took the time and effort to come out to see me and support me. I love you guys. You're my brothers. We always talk about it. But you just made my night. I'm going to see it again. I would have done it every night of the week if we had to. Thanks. That's all the time we have, I think. Okay. Oh, sure. Thanks, listener. Drive safe. I can't wait. Wait, wait, wait.

6:05I'm going to take that buyback. Okay. I can't wait. This is so exciting. This is so exciting. Okay. I'm going to nerd out, guys. Okay. William Shatner? It's Chewbacca. It's Chewbacca. Well, close. It's got a little Chewbacca. Our guest today, I'm so glad we got him here. I wasn't sure he'd be available because, as they say, he's hot, hot, hot right now in the Hollywood. That's triple hot. He really is all anyone talks about right now. At age 11, he was a Texas State swimming champion before throwing in the towel. Don't worry, he still had a Speedo on. And heading to the Golden State and then pursuing an acting career.

6:40He's become quite the staple in American culture in the last few years, being in the forefront of some major movie and television franchises. The internet refers to him as the ultimate daddy. But probably most importantly, he did a reading with me of Good Night Oscar only a few years ago. Please welcome my pal, Pedro Pascal. No way. Pedro. Hello. Good morning. Oh, this is a good guy. How exciting. Here we go. You can just pull over, turn your car off, and enjoy this. No, no, keep it on. It keeps going through the speakers. Pedro Pascal. Oh, my gosh. No, no. Erasm on this guy. Nope. Can't do it.

7:17Putting the curtain back on. No, he can't do it. Oh, he had to bail. Oh, no. Where'd he go? No, he had to bail. Just kidding. Just kidding. Where are you, Pedro, right now? Where am I? I'm in Los Angeles. Oh, you are? Okay, good. City of Angeles. And in your house? It looks like an empty interrogation room. It's like I'm in an empty interrogation room in Los Angeles. Dude, what? Can I move the camera around to even make it look even scarier than it? There really is absolutely no care. Wow, you're really in an empty room. I've been abducted. No. But they let you do a podcast. But they're fans of your podcast.

7:52Wow, that's good. Now, let me say something. It's true I'm into daddies. You've seen Scotty, but I'm not hitting you. I'm just celebrating how cool it is that the internet has collectively referred to you as our daddy, and you embrace it. I've seen you in interviews and stuff. You kind of like that. It's kind of cool. And look, you got the scruff going on. You wear the glasses. I just want people to like me. Well, just keep talking. This is what the kids call. You've got what the kids call Riz. Do we know what Riz is? No. No, what's Riz? Charasma. It's charisma. My kids would say they call it W Riz.

8:27You got that W Riz. Wild charisma. I'm going to get real embarrassed. I want to talk about Craig Mazin when we get to it. We'll get to Craig Mazin. We're not talking about Craig Mazin. The Mazin Mazin. I want to continue talking about Good Night, Oscar. We have to just a little bit. You have to invite me. No, we have to. Buddy, you've got to go see that. Because the opening was... Good Lord. Recently? Yeah. And the production is directed by Lisa Peterson, right? Correct. That's correct. Incredibly well directed. I did a staged reading for Lisa Peterson 23 years ago at the Taper. That's where I met her.

9:00Oh, wow. It was part of the, I can't remember what the label of the theater festival, New Works sort of season that it was. And I, nothing, I just, we're old. That's my point. Let's move on. This is amazing. Did you like her then? I loved her. It was amazing. I was desperate to get, you know, a job in professional theater, no matter where I was, whether it was Los Angeles or New York. Did that one end up going to stage? It did not. If it did, it did not go with me. Did you, so Pedro, you're from Texas, which I did not know. You started, did you start, were you doing theater in Texas? No. No. So I was born in Chile.

9:51Yeah, in Santiago, Chile. Yeah. And I have to say this. Let's not brag about the research, Sean. No, no, but I want to say this to you. En la escuela secundaria, en la clase de español, me llamaba Santiago porque otro chico eligió Juan. Pero que bien, Sean. Santiago, perdona. Do you know how to speak Spanish, Sean? Que orgullo. Si, un poquito. I said in Spanish class in high school, my name was Santiago because some other kid picked Juan, which is Sean. Will, this is a great opportunity for you to launch the Spanish character you're working on. Well, I would like to, but my character is from Bolivia, sadly, so he's not.

10:31He's close by. He's very close by, but I'm so sorry. That's better than the arbitrary Latino accents I have shared with the world. By the way, Pedro, I do want to... Sean, Jason, you can go, but I do want... Now that we're in South America and we're talking about this, Pedro, I am, I got to know you, not personally, but like a lot of people from watching Narcos, I thought you were so fucking great in Narcos. I loved, I loved Narcos. And you were so great in it. And it was like, I'm sure it was one of those things you've been working for years. And then everybody's like, hey, look at, look at this guy.

11:13And you're like, hey, man, I've been around for a long time. Right? Was that kind of how that happened? And filled with talent for years. It was, Narcos was a really lucky job. And I think it came on the coattails of the big fight of Oberyn Martell in the Mountain and Game of Thrones and the people over at Netflix realizing that I wasn't living past that episode. And then... Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. Sorry, everybody. From 10 years ago. See, I'm not a Game of Thrones fan, so I didn't, I've never watched it. It's not that you're not a fan. You just haven't seen it. It was a splashy guest role of the season, sort of at the height of the game's popularity.

11:51So good. The game's... Good God. It's early for me. Not only are we not going to cut that, we're going to double that one. Keep going. Well, that was really the first thing that... That was the first time I experienced sort of a larger exposure in relation to work in a big way. And that I would say... And you met David Benioff, and your life's never been the same. Exactly. We've all been watched by him. It completely started there for me as far as consistent work. And so because of Game of Thrones, I got Narcos. And then it was amazing. We shot the entire thing in Columbia. It was six to seven months a season.

12:31And they would have one. It was sort of like it was so location-based, you know, which is part of the reason I think the show worked as well as it did because the physical landscape of the show was kind of its secret weapon in that where we were shooting was kind of the main character of the show more than these larger-than-life, real, dangerous human beings and dangerous circumstances. What was that like working in Columbia? You know, I'm a soft guy, and all I'm thinking about is humidity, and I'm smelling a little bit of mildew on the wardrobe. Were we in the jungle, and was it tough to get dry?

13:10Sometimes we were in the jungle. The base of production was in Bogota, and Bogota is 9 ,000 feet. Right. And so I'm thinking the crispy snacks at Crafty were chewy, right? And so it was tough to get a good crunch out of the chips. You could never... No, no, it was dry. It wasn't humid up in Bogota. Bogota is like four seasons in a day, and humidity isn't part of it. It gets dry, sunny, rainy, windy, cold. It's generally... It's like Jason's personality, like from Monday to Friday. It's kind of cold, but... Manic. Manic, but sometimes beautiful. Hostile, but gorgeous. And the cocaine is always just around the corner.

13:51Yeah, exactly. Careful. Jay, I mean, and Jay, what was... Jay, really what he wants to know is, nice hotel and how close is the private airport? You know what I mean? And if he's got that down, then he's happy. I think it's only prop planes going in and out of those high-allegated locations. You guys would love Columbia. Really? And not for the reasons you think it is. Oh, yeah. Oh, it's the best. It's the best. It's the best place. I would love to go. I like the yellow soccer uniforms. It's all I'm into. For the books. You would like the beaches and the mountains and the people. We'll be right back.

14:27And now, back to the show. I think it's fascinating. I want these guys to hear this because when I was reading about your parents, the political asylum that they had to seek when you were a kid and going around the Denmark and then like... By the way, before you get into this, I'm going to ask these guys, Pedro, you know this, but we're going to expose these guys. Do you guys know who the dictator was in Chile who was, you know, ostensibly just a puppet of the American without looking it up? Paul Dunger. No. Darnesner. Pinochet. Anyway, keep going. That's what I said. Go ahead, Sean. I'm just exposing them, Pedro.

15:03He said enough vowels and consonants that you can kind of manipulate in the edit that he said Pinochet. How do you get it all in your head, Will? Will? Yes? How do you get it all in your head? How's he so smart, Sean? Because I don't think about anything else because my brain, I have very little, I have no street smarts. Pinochet. So your parents fled, so you guys fled as... Because they were in opposition to Pinochet. Yes. Is that true? Yes. No, it's a lie. Uh-oh. No, but you know sometimes they build, sometimes stuff on your Wikipedia gets kind of blown out of proportion. What was the deal there?

15:37Then I want to know how much you paid for your name because it's the best name in Hollywood. Well, he's going to get to that because his last name was different. Right, he had to change it. Yes, I was born Jose Pedro Balmaceda Pascal.

15:52And my parents, they were just very young when they had my sister and myself. My sister's two and a half years older than me. and there was a cousin of my mother's that was very, very involved in the opposition movement against the military regime, its proximity to our family. I wouldn't say that my parents were revolutionaries by any stretch of the imagination, but they were very young. Not actual dissidents or anything. No, they were young, liberal college students and ties from my mom's side to close ties to the opposition movement just in terms of family. It was a first cousin of my mother's.

16:35And my dad was doing his residency at the university hospital, La Catolica it's called, and so there was a gunfight that my parents were not involved in, but somebody was wounded, and they brought him to my parents' house so that my father could help tend the wound, hide them for a while. The person that brought them to our house and, you know, I was four months old at the time. He was taken into custody and tortured and gave names and then they came looking for my parents. Wow. And so then my parents had to go into hiding for about six months as it's been told to me and they, you know, like some sort of political thriller from the early 80s.

17:30They found a way to, they saw that there was a change of guard at the Venezuelan embassy where one guy got off the bus, the same bus that the other guy would get onto to switch places. and so there was this window where they could, you know, climb over the wall, like physically climb over the wall and then land on the other side of the wall and demand asylum. And it worked. One time, Jason, you told, Jason told, when you were a kid one time, you went to the guard and you didn't have the right pass at Warner's Then you had to go to the gate four instead of gate one. Is that true? And I thought about going over the wall, but I was wearing super tight pants.

18:21You had to park in the main lot, and you had to end up walking over to the stage instead of going through gate one. I heard about this. I jumped on the back of a golf cart. This is how Jason got his first job. It's not dissimilar in the guard, and then the pass didn't match up. Then I dropped my head shot. I had to double back for my head shot, and then the golf cart ran over it. Pedro, you know, I remember one of the reasons I know some of this stuff. When I was in 1981, and these guys know I'm good on dates the movie Missing came out with Sissy Spacek, Jack Lemmon and John Che was in it as well he's the guy who goes missing and my mom took me to see it in the theater I was probably too young but I was probably too young but she took me anyway and it had such an impact on me to see how other people were living and really in a real way so it's always I haven't paid attention necessarily but I always knew that that was the reality in that part of the world, especially at that time.

19:16And it occurs to me as you're telling this, and you're so good at telling this story, and you're such a, you do have that riz. You're very charismatic. Has it ever occurred to you, have you ever thought about sort of writing a story based on that or doing, no? No. Can we write it and would you do it? It's really fascinating. I mean, it is fascinating, man. It's, what an unbelievable story. It's totally unbelievable. I saw Missing myself when I was a kid. It had such an imprint in my, you know, brain when I saw it because of how closely I could relate it to my parents' experience. Oliver Stone direct that?

19:59No, it was Costa Gravas. And, you know, my mom was, like, little and beautiful, like Sissy Spacek, you know? Yeah. And I remember, I think about this now in my middle age, that how strange it is to get information in that way through cinema and relate it to a kind of immediate experience of my parents that they aren't sharing with me. Not that it was this big secret or anything like that, but they just, we just didn't talk about it. Really? Have you been back there since? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been back my whole life. They ended up on a list of pardoned exiles when I was eight years old. Oh, great.

20:50And so at that point, my older sister and I, we had already gotten sent back on our own, you know, the late 70s, early 80s, four-year-olds traveling by themselves, you know, in the custody of like a stewardess. I did that. But when I was eight, it was like a huge family reunion because there were very large families on both sides that were left behind. And ever since then, we'd go back my whole life. My younger siblings who were born in the States were actually raised in Chile. So the strange circumstance of having been born there, never living there, going there my whole life, it never being home, but it being home, and it's just been this ever-present...

21:37Do you have a place there now that you go back? I don't have a place there. Both my siblings and my father do. Yeah. Wow. But a couple other movies you mentioned that were kind of a big, like, shifting gears here. Peggy Sue got married and raising Arizona, you said, were, like, huge. And then also your mom wouldn't let you see a certain movie, I think? My dad. My mom didn't care. My mom didn't give a shit. My dad was really against me seeing The Breakfast Club. oh really yeah i could see he took me to go see first blood the big chill um you know uh anything that he was interested in saying frankly uh it didn't matter if it was rated r or not and um sean's in the breakfast club and the lunch club and the snack club and the dinner club and we're back all the sequels but yeah i wasn't allowed to i wasn't allowed to see the breakfast club because wow because just because it was what sent a bad message it was like yeah it was like kids complaining about their parents like you know watching that that's hysterical i want i have a thousand questions if you would like to hear one okay by the way i guarantee you you don't have a fucking thousand I do.

22:49So you came to California. Your dad moved you or your mom and dad both? We all came to Orange County in 86, 87. And then things happened. You went to New York, NYU. I went to, yeah. And then at 18, I went to New York, yeah. And you were terrible at waiting tables. I was. I really was. I was a bad waiter. and what restaurant do you remember there's so many are you guys oh this is the 90s I started so I lived in New York in the 90s I worked at where's the first place I started it sort of as coffee barista person in places that definitely don't exist anymore and then I got a job at Flamingo East do you remember Flamingo East on 2nd Avenue yeah there was a place on 7th and 2nd called I got a job at Time Cafe.

23:49No way. Got fired from Fez Bar. Yes. All of these sound like dancing clubs. And then I moved up to, Flamingo East had a party. They had different, they had an upstairs space and they would throw parties up there. And every once in a while I got to bartend that. And then... I remember Fred Armisen had his birthday once at Flamingo East like 20 years ago. Upstairs, yeah. Yeah. And it almost had like a living room. There was like a little back room and stuff. Do you remember that? Yeah. Yeah. It was this beautiful space. And they fired me. What did you do that was so bad in each of these spots? Yeah, because I read that you got fired over ten times from different places.

24:31In some instances, well, one, I wasn't very good. Yeah. But what about your work was not good? I didn't have the talent to... The talent. I don't know. Yeah, you know, it does. I think it really does take talent to know how to deal with any kind of customer more so than the customers is to deal with management, to be honest with you. and to kind of service the system of which you are a part of in terms of that environment. And I wasn't smart enough to kind of, you know, keep myself safe and perceived as a reliable... I was always on time and stuff like that, but they didn't like me enough to keep me if I needed to cover my shift again because I was going to go to Buffalo and shoot a Xerox industrial commercial and get stuck there, you know, because the acting...

25:33This all sounds like somebody who's got, they had like a major drug problem just covering, you know what I mean? Just going like, they didn't have the... And then he tried to tell us he was going to do a Xerox. My inconsistency with the showing up of the thing. By the way... All right, so you're bad at waiting tables. No, I was really innocent. I really was. I was just stupid, you know? No, you weren't stupid. I don't believe that for a second. But, you know, Pedro, you know that Jason's never, because he grew up in showbiz, this is a true story, he's never had one of those kinds of jobs. And I think that you kind of wish you had.