Pedro Pascal is having a major moment in Hollywood at the moment.
He's starring in not one but two hit TV shows in The Last of Us and The Mandalorian and it seems that everyone wants a piece of the Chilean-born American actor.
But the phone wasn't always ringing for the 48-year-old.
He's revealed in a wide-ranging interview with Esquire about the struggles he endured as he was trying to make a name for himself.
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Pascal initially tried to get gigs in New York City in the 1990s after attending NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
He auditioned for a bunch of TV show roles and commercials and it seemed like nothing was working out.
“I was getting my a** f**king kicked,” he told Esquire.
The actor moved to Los Angeles at the end of the decade to see if he could land some gigs there and managed to get on a few shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
After dealing with his mother's death the following year, he moved back to New York City and again tried to make it big.
He was in his mid 20s and started to get worried that acting might just not be the thing for him.
“I died so many deaths,” he revealed.
“My vision of it was that if I didn’t have some major exposure by the time I was 29 years old, it was over, so I was constantly readjusting what it meant to commit my life to this profession, and giving up the idea of it looking like I thought it would when I was a kid.
"There were so many good reasons to let that delusion go.”
Pascal's longtime friend Sarah Paulson says she would sometimes give him per diem from a role she was in just to keep him going.
Craig Mazin, the executive producer of The Last of Us, admits Pascal has had to work his backside off for years just to be a bankable actor.
“This was not somebody Hollywood sweated to make a star,” Mazin explained.
“They didn’t keep him out, but they didn’t drag him along, either; they just sat there with their arms crossed. And he fought all the way, and every single time, he connected.”
When Pascal was asked why he kept going despite his constant setbacks, he said it was down to his 'delusional self-determination'.
"And no real skill at anything else, is what kept me going," he added.
Topics: TV and Film
Stewart Perrie