Pedro Pascal is the Real Killer Cordycep

my brain chemistry is forever altered

HBO

Pedro Pascal has infiltrated every living facet of our collective consciousness. Fancams and photos and late-night appearances play ad nauseam across every TikTok, every tweet, every Instagram reel, reinforcing the unwitting, tentaculoid death grip the actor now has around our hearts and brains and throats.

A figure so unifying in his charisma and allure, Pascal has — seemingly overnight — inspired a profound obsession among any and all who have come to know his public persona. Fan accounts have slowed down the steamiest clips of his “Narcos” character — real-life DEA agent Javier Peña, who was instrumental in the capture and downfall of drug lord Pablo Escobar — and timed them perfectly to Sage the Gemini’s raunch-fest “Gas Pedal”. One fan made a playlist of every single song Pascal has ever mentioned in an interview. Another lamented the enormous age gap between them, creating a slideshow of the actor set to the Pony-Tails’ mournful 1958 track “Born Too Late”.

“Not me obsessed w his geriatric ass,” one user commented in response.

“One of the few times in life I’m very happy to be 40,” wrote another.

Even the toxic straight men of Reddit have collectively tossed aside their problematic ‘no homo’ caveat when it comes to Pascal, admitting that, actually, it’s OK to find other men hot.

Mental stability be damned, there is no vaccine for an infection this widespread.

Netflix

While there are some movies and television shows I have obsessed over and rewatched throughout the course of my 34 years on this planet (John Carpenter’s The Thing, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Titanic, Goodfellas, One Direction: This Is Us, “Lost”) music has always been the artistic medium I’ve compulsively devoted my life to knowing and consuming. Before all this, no actor’s personal life had ever been of any interest to me. 

So it makes sense that Pascal wasn’t on my radar until early last month, when the TikTok algorithm proved itself unparalleled yet again and began feeding me an endless supply of pro-Pascal propaganda moments after I accessed my parents’ HBO Max account to hit play on the killer star vehicle “The Last of Us” for the very first time.

“Oh, he’s funny,” I remember thinking, weeks ago, as I scrolled through my FYP. “I’ll just watch one more video.”

NBC

I have since spent an inordinate amount of time parked in front of my television, my computer, my phone, fully zeroed in on whatever Pascal project I can find. It helps that I am extremely unemployed right now.

Never before have I intentionally watched the full press junket for anything, ever. But I have seen every interview he’s given, for movies I will never watch. I have seen Pascal show Jimmy Fallon how to crack a whip, inadvertently memorized his most memorable one-liner from Kingsman: The Golden Circle, listened to every podcast he’s ever guested on. I have watched him break repeatedly during the absurdly funny “SNL” sketch ‘Lisa from Temecula’. I have saved an embarrassing amount of fan edits, memes, and delusional hot takes to my favorites folder. If the U.S. government’s TikTok ban ultimately comes to pass, thereby eliminating my main source of Pedro Pascal content, I will be forced to seek out foreign soil. It is a mistake, always, to find men attractive.

I even caved and watched the entirety of “The Mandalorian” thus far — a big step forward for an equal opportunity hater like myself, who once regretfully referred to the Baby Yoda as an ugly and pathetic nostalgia cash-grab.

In my defense I had not yet seen Grogu in gif-form and am also a major loser. I did not realize how cute he really is.

“He doesn’t take off the helmet,” my mother, a massive Star Wars nerd, warned me after I offered to watch the series with her, because I had developed a major affinity for the man beneath the mask.

“Yeah, but it’s still his voice,” I responded.

This is a man who tweeted in 2014, “I really need to stop eating the sticker on the tomato”, whose technological ineptitude has left him with more than 500 unread texts at any given time because he can’t figure out how to delete them, who shoots every fan Q&A video from the most unflattering angle imaginable because he is just now reaching extraordinary heights of fame at 47 years old.

The global infatuation feels fresh, but it would be unfair to qualify Pascal’s stardom as brand new. His recent role as reluctant father figure Joel Miller — from the aforementioned adaptation of the much-beloved mushroom zombie video game — may have catapulted his status from oh yeah, that guy to household name in a matter of weeks, but he’s been a working actor for nearly 30 years, slowly increasing in visibility all the while.

This is how I know.

There is a Squarespace site I won’t link here that hosts every single clip available of Pascal’s extensive filmography, all compiled onto one web page whose sheer length rivals the enduring expanse of a CVS receipt. Visit the site to see highly pixelated clips of him playing an Armenian boxer, a ‘goth guy’, a vampire (twice!), a gas station attendant, a stoner, the love interest in a Sia music video, a homeless war veteran suffering from PTSD. He has appeared in every iteration of “Law & Order” known to man, every cop procedural that has ever shot in New York City. Catch him downing an entire glass of water in 15 seconds in a bizarre short film where an old woman murders and buries him beneath her flower bed. Watch him tap dance, in boxers, across tables and then the sky for a shockingly ineffective sock commercial.

The sheer volume of his credits alone is impressive, even if – through no fault of his own – the projects themselves are not. Pascal is a wildly talented actor, but rent, very clearly, has been due his entire career, and the nature of the game – showbiz is rife with job insecurity, after all – seemingly caused him to say yes to any and every project ever offered to him. If, ten years ago, I’d shot an indie film on an old camcorder and offered him the lead role in exchange for a Snickers bar and an IMDB credit, I feel like he probably would’ve said yes.

I’ve done things strictly for a paycheck, too.

I was too embarrassed to attach my name to this, but I did, in fact, write it

Still, the worst offense Pascal has been found guilty of is his brief appearance in the Gal Gadot-headed “Imagine” video. The tone deaf clip features a slew of celebs — deep in crisis after being forced to quarantine inside their sprawling mansions — singing various lines from the famed John Lennon track. An unintentionally brilliant misstep that failed to unite the world amid the COVID-19 pandemic the way its author intended, the video instead offers unprecedented insight into the fragile psyche of the rich and famous. It was posted a mere six days into lockdown. The rest of us were still going to work.

Gadot meant well, sure, but it’s a fever dream of a blunder so glaring in its obliviousness it even has its own Wikipedia page. 

Pascal’s involvement, of course, has been explained away or forgotten. Even the Teens — forever the most unforgiving demographic — have publicly forgiven him this grave lapse in judgment. And to be fair, it really does look like someone’s standing just out of frame with a loaded gun aimed at his temple. Wonder Woman 1984 — a terrible movie in which Pascal delivers a fantastically campy performance as villain Maxwell Lord alongside Gadot’s titular character — wouldn’t be released for another nine months. What choice did he really have?

self-aware king

Pascal went live several months ago on the Lionsgate TikTok account, where he spent the full 20 minutes breathing heavily into his giant iPad, unable to read fans’ comments as they came streaming in at lightning speed. “I think I’m gonna pass out,” he said, no less than 10 times. I watched every single second of it.

It’s a phenomenon I can only compare to the time I lost years of my life fawning over One Direction. That was almost a decade ago and, frankly, this is much worse. There are far less haters this time around. Pascal’s appeal is simply too widespread. I thought I was free. What the fuck is going on?

Yes, the obvious is true: Pascal is extremely talented, funny, smart, sexy, self-admittedly “not short”.

And falling victim to celebrity crushes is nothing new to the general public. That’s half the point (and, I imagine, all of the allure) of fame. But the hyper-fixation and mass adoration extends beyond mere good looks and on-screen charisma. There is something bigger at play when it comes to Pascal.

He is impossibly charming in interviews, even when he isn’t trying to be. Look no further than his appearance on “Hot Wings”, a show where celebs sit down for an interview while eating chicken wings doused in increasingly hotter sauces. Host Sean Evans offers space at the tail end of each segment for interviewees to clue fans in on what’s next in the works for them. Where most guests use that time to plug their upcoming projects, Pascal speaks, instead, about the enduring physical pain of agreeing to participate in the challenge itself.

“There’s a gap in between my back molar and my front tooth. That’s where the chicken gets stuck, and it continues to sort of burn,” he said, “but I’ve gotten used to the sensation of my jaw having been melted away by battery acid.”

His delivery here is perfect, just the right amount of comedy, candor, and authenticity conveyed without an ounce of cloying self-pity. His personality has yet to be media trained out of him, showcasing the rare kind of sincerity that’s only believable when it comes from someone who actually struggled to pay his phone bill for 20 years. 

Pascal pokes fun at himself without ever taking shots at those around him. He is intellectual without pretension, goofy without being annoying. He takes his work seriously without taking himself seriously. He has admitted to frequenting Pedro Pascal fan pages when he’s in need of an ego boost, presenting this fact up with the kind of embarrassed humility few people with a net worth of over $10 million can get away with. Every romantic partner he’s ever been linked to — both men and women — has been age appropriate. He is a good sport in interviews, even when maybe he shouldn’t be.

(Sidenote: There is much to be said about the dubious ethics behind ambushing a celebrity with depraved thirst tweets for the sake of a soundbite, but that’s a topic for another post I’ll never get around to writing.)

More astounding is the way he treats women. So often men — even the good ones — will perform for each other, and the easiest way to do that is to degrade the women around them.

But Pascal never succumbs to this. He has reverence for the women in his life, has spoken at length about a Greek chef named Helen who acted as a surrogate parental figure when he first moved to Red Hook, Brooklyn. He has opened up with so much admiration and care about his late mother, Verónica, referring to her always as the true love of his life. He celebrated his sister, Lux, after she came out as a trans woman years ago.

Instagram

He is affectionate with his co-stars without ever crossing a line. He compliments interviewers, tells them he loves their nails or their hair, says he thinks they look beautiful. All of this has the potential to come off as predatory, but you never get the sense that there’s an undercurrent of obligatory reciprocation. It feels akin to drunken bar bathroom visits, when a girl compliments your makeup and outfit and hair and then slips back out into the night without further expectation. She says something in the moment simply because she believes it to be true. Pascal feels like someone safe.

Fans have written in comment sections all across social media that Pascal’s attitude and behavior towards women, his soft masculinity, has raised the bar for men everywhere. Even his famous female costars have spoken about him so lovingly, saying he actually listens when they speak, that he is so kind and generous and deserving of the sudden burst in adoration.

“Yellowjackets” star Melanie Lynskey — whose long-held talents are seeing a similar boost in overdue recognition — offered Pascal effusive praise in an interview earlier this month. “He’s such a dreamboat,” she said. “He’s just kind. He looks you in the eye, you feel like no one else is in the room when he’s talking to you. … He’s very funny, he’s very handsome, he’s so talented. … There’s just nothing wrong with him. He’s just, like, a perfect person.”

There is so much sadness within the subtext of it all, because what Pascal offers should be unremarkable. The worst kind of men think women value money and status above all else. But the simple truth of it is this: Women just want men to respect them.

In saying all of this, I would like to formally recognize that I do not know Pedro Pascal. I will never know Pedro Pascal. And as a human, it is inevitable he will someday disappoint. Perhaps this is a gross misread of who he is, and he’s actually a sociopathic con artist who’s kept his lunacy under wraps for 47 years. Men are horrible. I wouldn’t be all that surprised.

But that kind of diabolical manipulation is admirable in its own right. Allow me to kick off the Oscars campaign 10 months early, rose-colored glasses fused permanently to my zygomatic bone. Pedro Pascal for Best Actor 2024. Either way, he deserves it.