Pedro Pascal: The Actor Who Speaks When Others Won’t

Celebrities are on high alert these days. Take a wrong step, say the wrong thing, or let one loose interview puncture your media bubble, and you could be facing a full-on PR crisis. As such, most entertainers make sure they use their mouths for muting. Interviews are carefully staged, journalists are fed no-frills answers, and publicists line up battle strategies. But not Pedro Pascal.

With an ever-expanding global audience and Instagram followers numbering in the 11 million plus, the 50-year-old award nominee is making it clear that he has no plans of toning himself down.

In the past, he’s spoken candidly about social issues as well as actively lending his voice to charities such as Doctors Without Borders and The Trevor Project. When he’s not acting, Pascal is reading or educating himself on current events in what he describes as a “punishing” way.

During a recent interview with Sky News in London in support of his new film, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Pascal took a second from the marathon press conference to speak with Sky’s NatachaBB about the things that matter to him. The four-minute-and-two-second interview is less press chat and more Pascal manifesto.

“It’s very easy to get scared, no matter what you sort of talk about,” Pascal says. “It’s very easy for anything to get thrown out of context, whether intentionally or unintentionally. There are so many different ways that things can get kind of fractured and have a life of itself.”

Easy for things to go viral? Check. Are celebrities always one sentence from saying the wrong thing? Check. For most stars, the stakes are so high that they’re keeping their mouths zipped. But Pascal? Never.

“There’s one thing that you can say, and no matter what your intention behind it, it is lost in all of these different headlines, I suppose,” Pascal adds. “But I’ll never shut up.”

Wait. Really?

In a world where bad press is less yellow and more scarlet, where does a Pedro Pascal pop off in interview land? But when you consider that Pascal’s ascension to Hollywood stardom has been untraditional, lengthy, and in many ways meteoric in his late 40s, his appetite for speaking out becomes less surprising.

A regular in his publicist’s crosshairs for fear of such things, he’s increasingly putting in work as much off-camera as he is on it. In January, he was spotted wearing a “Protect The Dolls” shirt while making a public appearance in the United States. The shirt itself is a reference to the Miami ban on drag shows. Last month, he used Instagram to highlight the food blockade in Gaza. In May, he helped raise funds for Healthcare Ready.

All of which to say that Pascal knows he’s in a unique position: living and working in one of the most lucrative industries in the world, while also having the capacity and drive to amplify some of the big issues of the day. If he knows it too, then so do his fans.

Playing an extraordinarily intelligent and slightly shouldered Reed Richards in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Pascal not only takes on the inner workings of a brilliant inventor who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders. It’s a duality Pascal has by all accounts displayed while preparing for the birth of his child with wife, Actress Alexis Love, as Reed must balance the duty to care for his young wife, Sue Storm (played by Oscar nominee Vanessa Kirby), with having to discover solutions to growing threats from his everyday heroics.

Which might be why Pascal, who was set to work alongside Marvel favorites Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Chiklis, and Owen Wilson before MCU head honchos decided to shake up the formula with First Steps, resonates in the role so well. Asked to reprise the superhero without fanfare and perform his otherworldly hijinks solo, the actor makes good on recent history by once again showing up and showing out.

The Marvel Comics character is renowned for his genius. In the first installment, Pascal, who previously took on a wackjob arms dealer in his Oscar-shortlisted role in The Last of Us: Season 1, is once again called to put on the face of steel and muscle up when necessary while also providing the cooler and more collected emotional barometer in what is an evenly split quartet of characters in the film.

Directed by WandaVision‘s Matt Shakman, Fantastic Four: First Steps is an entirely standalone entry within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The move ensures the film, which also includes Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn, both newcomers to the franchise, has room to breathe independently from the larger franchise while continuing to build out the fourth chapter of Marvel’s on-screen comic legacy.

As Pascal, the handsome recently divorced star of Game of Thrones and The Last of Us, towers over 6 feet tall with his eyelids shrunk and his newly caramel skin inked and in order, his casting in the part also makes sense. Playing the overburdened-but-perfectly-level-headed Reed Richards is a certain type of poetic justice. For if anyone seems to balance the care for what they can and the scale of their impact, it is Pascal himself.

A public figure is Pascal, isn’t afforded the luxury of quietly reflecting on his choices, especially when the landscape in which we now live seems intent on projecting as much opinion and misinformation as possible at the drop of a hat.

But in a strange way, isn’t that why stars speak in quotes? To make it so they can be interpreted after the fact as palatable? If so, Pascal eschews that convention to take a chance instead. One where he could face the very consequences he’s seen others bear over the years. But for Pedro Pascal, the fear just doesn’t seem to be enough.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps opens on Friday, July 14, in the United Kingdom and on July 21 in the United States.