At this point, Pedro Pascal must be one of the most beloved actors of his generation. The Chilean-born star landed his breakthrough role in 2011, appearing as the ill-fated Oberyn Martell (the one who has his eyes gouged out, or rather, pushed in) in the fourth season of Game of Thrones. Since then, he’s appeared in Narcos, received critical acclaim for his performance in The Mandalorian and brought Joel Miller’s character to life for HBO’s TV adaptation of The Last of Us. Here, he names his ten favourite movies of all time.
The first thing to say about Pascal is that he’s a huge fan of horror and comedy. His first pick, An American Warewolf In London, blends the two: “It’s amazing,” he told Sky. “We got cable TV when I was very young. It scared me. I thought it was hilarious, and you watch it now, and it still holds up.” Famed for its special effects, the 1981 picture still features one of the best transformation scenes in any monster movie.
That’s not the only horror on Pascal’s list. Alongside mentions of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Richard Donner’s The Omen, the actor named both Candyman, which “scared the shit out of me”, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. “It kind of breaks your heart when you watch it again,” he said of the latter. “Shelley Duvall is so phenomenal in the movie, and I also look at the performance of the child as one that has never been achieved again at that level of complete naked honesty.”
Pascal also mentions a couple of sci-fi pictures, including Basic Instinct (“three words: white cocktail dress”) and the original Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford. “I remember going and seeing the director’s cut in the movie theatre. I’d already seen the movie several times, but I saw it on the big screen for the first time, and I remember it was the first time that just a visual [scene], which was the introduction of the movie, made me cry.” Incidentally, Ford is the star of the Steven Spielberg classic Pascal names as his favourite movie of all time: Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom
That being said, the films that seem to have made a lasting impact on Pascal seem to be gritty dramas like Cape Fear, which he described as “the best remake of anything that I’ve ever seen. I remember seeing that in the cinema when I was a kid,” he continued, “and seeing Juliet Lewis and just [feeling] what I guess some people felt when they saw Brando, maybe, in Streetcar. The strangeness of her performance, I remember, just honestly blowing my mind.”
Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing also left Pascal reeling: “If you think about it, there hasn’t been a movie that comes close to addressing what that movie was so bold in looking at at the time. It’s also something I saw in the movie theatre with my father. It changed my brain. It recalibrated the way that I looked at the world that I was living in.”
None of this is to say Pascal doesn’t appreciate a solid comedy; he included both Tootsie (“One of the best comedies I think i’eve ever seen”) and Bridesmaids on his list. “The funniest person I’ve ever worked with is Kristen Wigg,” he said. “One of my favourite people I’ve ever worked with, and also the funniest.
Check out Pedro Pascal’s full selection below:
Pedro Pascal names his 10 favourite movies:
- An American Warewolf In London (Anthony Waller, 1997)
- Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1987)
- The Big Lebowski (The Coen Brothers, 1998)
- The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
- Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992)
- Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991)
- Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1989)
- Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008)
- Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1983)
- Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011)
Honourable Mentions:
- Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992)
- Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom
- Do The Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
- Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
- The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976)