Pedro Pascal’s journey through formal education, which took him from Chile to California and then California to New York, was neither glamorous nor quick. In retrospect, however, it seems almost inevitable that a child who spent his early years traveling between nations, languages, and identities would eventually settle into a drama school.
Pascal’s family fled Chile when he was nine months old in order to escape the Pinochet dictatorship. Pascal was born in Santiago in 1975. A person is shaped by that kind of early displacement in ways that no classroom could. He was eleven years old and had more life experience than most adults by the time his family moved to Orange County, California.
His official artistic training started in Orange County. He graduated in 1993 from Orange County School of the Arts. The school provided something useful and uncommon for an adolescent still figuring out his place in the world: a controlled environment where he could experiment with performance without feeling ashamed. The urge to act might have remained hidden beneath all that restlessness in the absence of that early environment.
He relocated to the east after graduating and enrolled at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Alec Baldwin, Kristen Bell, and Angelina Jolie are just a few of the well-known names that Tisch has produced. The program is renowned for taking its craft seriously. In 1997, Pascal finished his BFA there. It’s worth stopping for that alone. Raised in two US states and several other countries, the son of political refugees graduated from one of the nation’s most prestigious acting programs with a fine arts degree. Something about that is subtly amazing.
But the real interesting part of the story is what transpired after graduation. In 1997, Pascal failed to land a significant role. or in 2000. or in 2005. He had small roles for almost twenty years, including pilot here, guest spot there, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and NYPD Blue. He was a waiter. By his own admission, he was fired from jobs nearly ten times. According to reports, he received per diem money from his close friend Sarah Paulson so he could eat. He had less than seven dollars in his bank account at one point, but Buffy’s leftover check kept him afloat.
No transcript can adequately convey this aspect of Pedro Pascal’s educational journey. Tisch surrounded him with peers who shared his seriousness about performance, taught him technique, and gave him language for the craft. However, he learned something different in the hard, unglamorous years that followed Tisch. How to stay in it when there’s no rational reason to. How to continue attending auditions while working a lunch shift.
Observing Pascal’s demeanor during interviews gives the impression that the challenges of those years calibrated rather than broke him. He once thought about how he was constantly changing the definition of “success” and letting go of the notion that it had to look a certain way by a certain age. Classrooms don’t teach that kind of thinking. It gradually wears you down.
When he was chosen to play Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones in 2014, it was his big break. His age was 38. He had graduated from NYU seventeen years earlier, and hardly anyone in the audience knew who he was. The career path that followed—Narcos, The Mandalorian, The Last of Us, and numerous Emmy nominations—makes the protracted wait seem almost planned in hindsight. But it wasn’t, of course.
Pedro Pascal’s formal and informal education spans two schools and roughly two decades of near-invisibility. He had a foundation thanks to Tisch’s BFA. Everything else came from the struggle.
