The Decline And Fall Of Pedro Pascal
Is happening faster than I had expected
Twelve days ago, I predicted the imminent decline of Pedro Pascal’s career. His new Fantastic Four: First Steps movie is in last-minute reshoots just weeks before release as producers humanize the Silver Surfer and replace the entire third act because test audiences did not like Pascal in it. Postmodern Hollywood is incapable of telling a heroic story and makes casting choices based on identity characteristics. Pedro Pascal’s star has risen in these business conditions, which are rapidly changing. After years of overexposure, Pascal will be the wrong man for the new roles in Tinseltown, anymore.
That essay, linked below, is still locked another ten days for premium subscribers only. As if my words were a cue in his script, Pascal provided fresh fodder for critics, so that the entertainment channels that I follow are abuzz with new speculation about his imminent decline and fall. Comparisons to Rachel Zegler are general. It is all happening the way I had expected, but faster than I had expected. Here is an update on the retrograde character arc of Padro Pascal, the man who made his fortune playing emasculated manhood when the movie business was at peak woke. May his kind never see such overexposure again.
Pascal took an economy class flight to Cannes last weekend: “man of the people,” slobbered USA Today. He showed up on the red carpet in a black muscle tee: “a sleekly sexy sight to behold,” gushed “the internet”. He gave Alexander Skarsgård a big smooch as everyone celebrated the new gay BDSM-themed movie, Pillion; they were “giving the internet exactly what it wants,” the internet muttered as Vanity Fair swooned. This is the movie industry machinery promoting a brand attached to multiple forthcoming projects.
During a press conference for his own film, Eddington, Pascal was asked about Latin America, and whether the United States will “become a completely closed country to the world?” Pascal affected humility. “I mean, obviously it’s very scary for an actor who participated in a movie to sort of speak to issues like this,” he said. “It’s far too intimidating of a question to even address, I’m not informed enough. I want people to be safe and to be protected,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. He was an actor performing a role.
And I want very much to live on the right side of history. And I’m an immigrant, my parents are refugees from Chile. I myself was a refugee. We fled a dictatorship and I was privileged enough to grow up in the US … after asylum in Denmark, and if it weren’t for that, I don’t know what would have happened to us. And so I stand by those protections, always. I’m too afraid of your question. I hardly remember what it was.
Yet Pascal’s fear vanished when a correspondent for RogerEbert.com asked the panel about the fear of being put on a government “dossier” for being in such a “brave” film. “I think that fear is the way that they win, for one,” Pascal volunteered, not explaining who ‘they’ are. “And so keep telling the stories and keep expressing yourself and keep fighting to be who you are.”
Right side of history, be who you are: this is the trans-affirming talk of a man who complains about J.K. Rowling on Instagram. Pascal was “code-switching,” as the progressive kids say. “And, I don’t know, fuck the people who try to make you scared, you know, and fight back,” he added. “And this is the perfect way to do so, is telling stories. And don’t let them win. Don’t let them win.”
Who are “they/them”? Reader, you already know. They/them are the wrong side of history.
In the film, Pascal plays the mayor of Eddington, a New Mexico town disintegrating during the Covid pandemic. According to Dan Gentile at SFGate.com, the film “ends with a COVID-denier going on a literal murdering spree against liberal characters and framing his precinct’s only Black cop for the killings, then using a machine gun to fight off an ‘antifa’ terrorist attack.” Gentile calls the press conference “shameful” because no one would say who “they” are.
Instead, “the weakest answers to political questions were met with affectionate cheers from the audience of journalists.” Gentile complains that “Joaquin Phoenix could not have looked more uncomfortable. He held his hand in front of his face for periods of time, and talked far enough away from his microphone that his answers were unintelligible.” However, “Pascal’s voice alone is so soothing, I laughed along at his graceless dodges,” Gentile admits.
Here we see the dynamic that is killing cinematic franchises: the press wants movie stars to discuss politics, but the movie stars are wise to avoid discussing politics, for the audience is utterly exhausted by politics in their films. Adding contemporary partisan politics to any narrative means angering half the potential audience. When a movie centers on marginal lifestyles or subcultures, the potential audience shrinks even further.
Self-congratulatory affairs like Cannes are remote from the lives of most Americans. No one watches the Oscars anymore because the most popular films never win, while no one asked for the films that win to be made in the first place. Joaquin Phoenix was clearly unhappy that the press conference got sidetracked by questions aimed at eliciting partisan responses. Pascal was both reticent and outspoken, the worst of both worlds, using code to say the unsaid. Gentile would rather both actors imitate Rachel Zegler, because her sort of outspokenness worked out so well for Disney’s live-action Snow White.
Here is a video clip of the presser that includes Pascal’s answers.
The film reportedly skewers pretensions on both sides of the political aisle. “As a conservative sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) mounts a campaign against the liberal mayor (Pedro Pascal) trying to enforce a mask mandate, their fellow citizens radicalize in different ways,” Kyle Buchanan writes at The New York Times. “The sheriff’s wife (Emma Stone) and mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell) lean hard into internet conspiracy theories, while the teenage residents of Eddington become phone-wielding activists whose strident attitudes incur much of Aster’s satire.”
Director Ari Aster has declined to project a distinctly partisan perspective. “I’ve talked to people who felt the film goes harder on the liberal characters than the conservatives,” Buchanan says by way of a question. “I just don’t see what preaching to the choir will do,” Aster replies. Instead, he tells Buchanan he wanted to present “a world where nobody agrees about what is happening. We’re living in this age of hyper-individualism, and for the last 20 years we’ve been on this track” leading to the present age of atomized reality. Eddington is about the terror of life in a post-politics world.
Covid felt like an inflection point, where the link to the old society we lived in was finally cut. That old idea of democracy being something that could be any sort of countervailing force to power and tech and finance, it went away completely at that moment, and it’s where I think we became fully isolated.
Injecting partisanship into the discussion of this particular film utterly defeats the intentions of the director. Pascal’s family did in fact flee Chile when the leftist regime of Salvador Allende fell to a right-wing coup led by subsequent dictator Augusto Pinochet. That is, Pascal’s aristocratic father happened to be something of a communist, whereas today, Pedro’s ideology is open borders and gender communism, which he injects into press conferences about his movies.
Pedro has a brother who ‘identifies’ as a woman, Lux. He chose his mother’s surname over his father’s as an actor. According to court filings, Pascal was a political kommissar in the trans-affirmation struggle sessions for Gina Carano, his former co-star on The Mandalorian. Transgender demands are his real political passion. When speaking of refugees, Pascal wants universal safety and protection, two words from the dialectic of intersectional feminism.
Pascal “could have Hollywood at his feet — if Disney can get him to shut up,” Ed Power writes at The Telegraph. Pascal is “speaking truth to Donald Trump” at Cannes, Power points out, helpfully filling in the ‘they/them’ blank. While he compares Pascal to Harrison Ford (“nobody in 1982 had a clue about his politics”), “the stark truth is that [Pascal]’s never had top billing on a hit movie,” Power says.
He notes that Pascal has played “a Donald Trump-like corrupt businessman in the appalling Wonder Woman: 1984,” which “was a critical and commercial disaster” that “did little to dent Pascal’s reputation. He walked away from the flaming wreckage, not even slightly singed.” Pascal’s decade of stardom has been “a charmed existence.”
Has an actor ever enjoyed higher approval ratings than Pascal? He’s basked in universal acclaim since he was christened the “internet’s daddy” in 2023 following his one-two father-figure parts in The Last of Us and The Mandalorian, where he portrays the titanium-encased guardian of Baby Yoda. Tellingly, interest in The Last of Us has declined since he was killed off, with ratings dropping by an estimated 30 per cent.
But “is there a danger that this high flyer might come crashing to earth?” Power asks. Citing the Snow White disaster without mentioning Rachel Zegler, he observes that “Disney is clearly keen to keep politics at arm’s length. The last thing it will want is its biggest star using the red carpet to diss JK Rowling or fire potshots at Donald Trump’s immigration policy.”
Thus, even as Pascal participates in the publicity tours for the many projects that he is in, that are still coming out of various studio production pipelines, the press is laying the groundwork for Pascal’s diminishment, hedging their bets.
As if on cue, Dakota Johnson, star of the Fifty Shades trilogy, randomly revealed this week that “Pedro Pascal told me that I should have an OnlyFans and that I could just like wiggle my toe and make money.” Deadpanning, Johnson asked: “Should I do that?” (You can watch the Elle “interview” on YouTube here.) Someone call HR.
Power made used of this anecdote Joe Pantoliano shared with Variety. Published while Pascal was in Cannes, it refers to Pantoliano’s recent guest appearance in The Last of Us, a streaming series that is slavishly based on the video game series of the same name. Pascal agreed to play Joel, the male lead, knowing that the second season would emasculate and murder his character to own the chuds, as happened in the video game. Pantoliano, who suffered a head injury when he was struck by a vehicle in 2020, did not recognize Pascal from many years before. Pascal seemed a bit sore about it. This anecdote may take on a different cast later, when hit pieces start to appear. Emphasis added:
I was about say, “Hi, nice to meet you,” and all of a sudden he starts going, “Joey Pants! Joey Pants!” And he starts hugging me and kissing me, and “How are you, how’ve you been?!” And I’m like, Oh my God!
Because even if I didn’t get hit on my head, you see and meet so many people, and you forget, did we work together? Or didn’t we work together? So, he could read [that]. He’s like, “You don’t fucking remember me?! I’ve been to your house, for Christ’s sake! I’ve been to your apartment in Hoboken!” Then he said, “Sam Weisman? The play reading?” Now that Pedro was 21 years old. Skinny kid. I remember him, but 25 years later, there was this whole other person. He pulled up a picture, later in the day. He said, “Look, I have a picture of when we did the reading. Here’s a picture of you and me.” And I was like, Holy Christ, yeah, I remember that guy. So it was fantastic to reacquaint myself with him. We went out to dinner, and it was just like no time had diminished, you know, except now he’s a big movie star.
Pascal does not like to be forgotten. He also likes to hug and kiss guys to show that he is not afraid to be a little bit gay. At Cannes, he kissed Alexander Skarsgård in front of the whole world. And then on Monday, the Pascal Archive X account tweeted this silent video of its eponymous movie star owning the chuds with a rainbow glow stick, homoerotic rave-style. Pascal does not seem authentic here, in fact he strikes me as awkward, able only to perform a fifteen-second joke badly. Speculation about Pascal’s sexuality quite misses the point that he is putting off part of the potential audience on purpose. He is owning the chuds.
Never mind the sexuality, or the sexualized display. Pedro Pascal was never cut out to be a great leading man to begin with. He was however a perfect non-Anglo, non-toxic male to play the male leads at a time when studios were making content to own the chuds. Fantastic Four: First Steps is undergoing a hasty, expensive fix because his Reed Richards is the buffoon-father figure that owns the chuds.
In the preview released last month, we see Pascal declare in anguish that “it’s my fault.” Is he referring to Susan Storm’s pregnancy, or the imminent doom of earth? Why not both. “Are we safe?” a reporter asks. “I don’t know,” Pascal replies. But he vows: “We will protect you.” Then he reportedly fails, in the version being revised now, but emerges in the Marvel Endgame universe, reportedly to lead the next big feature film(s) for that franchise.
A focus on ‘safety’ and ‘protection’. A man who fails, and then gets promoted for letting women lead: this describes the male roles that have become most common in the post-Harvey Weinstein era of movies. Pascal was typecast in those roles, which explains his overexposure.
For a decade, Hollywood let stars get away with outspoken progressive radicalism. However, franchise failures are now forcing a reassessment of risks. Disney CEO Bob Iger is keen to start making money again — instead of pandering to a ‘modern audience’ that does not exist, with messages that repel the audience which does exist. As a result, rumors that Pascal’s star has indeed begun to set have emerged in the last week.
In the hands of producer Kevin Fiege, who prefers social commentary to profits, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has seen so many gender-swapped characters and girlbosses that pop culture critic Gary Buechler aka Nerdrotic coined the term “M-she-U” to describe it. Now Iger is reportedly feuding with Fiege about the new X-Men film, demanding “a more action-heavy, spectacle-focused script aimed at mass appeal” instead of a heavy dialogue on mutant identity.
Production is also delayed on Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars as the studio braces for the impact of a box office bomb with Fantastic Four. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo have reportedly nixed Pascal as the male lead for both films, preferring Chris Pratt, star of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise.
A conservative, Pratt is much more reserved about airing his opinions than Pedro Pascal, and therefore less of a Rachel Zegler-Snow White risk. Already a leading man, Pratt is popular, drawing a big audience with his masculine performances. Pascal’s casting appeal on the other hand has largely been political, a storytelling approach which carries huge risks anymore. There are plenty of people in and around the movie business who have still not figured that out, but of course they are not the people standing to lose the billions.
Pedro Pascal has one more big film coming out next year, The Mandalorian & Grogu. An audience that has already stopped watching Star Wars content, that tuned out The Mandalorian after Carano’s firing, will have little reason to care. The film will likely already be released in the middle of intense litigation between Gina Carano and Disney that promises to embarrass Lucasfilm and implicate Pascal in the campaign of personal destruction that Carano alleges she experienced. His outspoken views have been systematically ignored by the same people who destroyed her career, a patent double standard.
If the film underperforms — which seems likely — expect Pascal’s star to set quickly. Cutthroat competitors will have their knives out, so that industry ‘leaks’ and rumors will increase. Old anecdotes will be told anew, in darker tones. The new Hollywood wants a leading man. Pedro Pascal is not that man.
Kathleen Kennedy, Quarterback Princess?
Recently, I wrote an essay about Kathleen Kennedy that went viral, so I followed it up by looking for further information about her. That’s how I found out that Vanity Fair and kids’ lit publisher Bellwether Media have propagated a dubious anecdote that Kennedy was the quarterback of her middle school boys’ football team.