Chasing Hollywood? Pedro Pascal doesn’t sugarcoat it: ‘You’ve got to eat sh*t’
Pedro Pascal has some brutally frank advice for actors just starting out — and his take on making it in Hollywood isn’t exactly sugar-coated.
If you know anything about Pedro Pascal, you know he didn’t just show up one day as the star of everything. His career has been a long haul — and apparently, a bit of a battering. The man recently popped onto the Variety Awards Circuit Podcast to give his honest take on what it’s like trying to break into Hollywood. Let’s just say he didn’t sugar-coat it.
“You've got to eat sh*t, and you've got to take a lot of sh*t. That's part of it,” Pascal stated on the podcast, when asked to hand out advice for actors just starting out.
This isn’t just Pascal being dramatic. He’s genuinely reflecting on two decades of picking up bit-parts before anyone cared who he was. According to him, slogging through the tough bits is not just inevitable, it shapes you — teaching you, in his words, how to actually treat people well and appreciate those small acts of kindness along the way. He also credited his progress to the “generosity of others,” saying he owes his career to what’s basically a whole crowd of people who helped him at one point or another.
Twenty Years to the Top
Before Hogwarts-level fame from Game of Thrones, Pascal was putting in years of thankless work. He finally got noticed in 2014, at age 39, playing Oberyn Martell during the show’s fourth season. And even at that crucial crossroads, he didn’t swan off into blockbuster territory straight away — he went back to his theatre roots, stepping into Don John for 'Much Ado About Nothing' at Shakespeare in the Park. It’s a very classically-trained actor sort of move, that.
“I miss being with everyone every day. I miss Tony [Gilroy],” Pascal admitted, talking about his time filming Behemoth! — calling it the project he misses more than anything else he’s done.
He was also feeling a bit nostalgic about working on The Last of Us in Alberta, reliving the experience of sharing that show with audiences around the world. And if you were wondering, yes, he’s still sentimental about this journey and the characters — apparently Behemoth! is the one production he’d go back to in a heartbeat.
- Pascal’s career took off in 2014 with Game of Thrones, after twenty years of bit-parts.
- The upcoming monster flick Behemoth! opens in cinemas 4 December 2026.
- He’s also set to appear in Avengers: Doomsday, which is out 18 December 2026.