Actor waited years for breakthrough in ‘ Thrones’
LONDON — Pedro Pascal was a little lost.
He exited the Liverpool Street train station, staring at the glowing blue Google Maps dot on his iPhone screen. And that is when he nearly had an ending much like that of Oberyn Martell, the character he played on ‘‘Game of Thrones.’’
While crossing the street, he looked left when he should have looked right (classic error of the tourist in London), and a double-decker bus came
He barely had a moment to compose himself when he was spotted.
‘‘Pascal Pedro!’’ said a young man, getting his name almost right. ‘‘Can we get a photo? We love your character in ‘Game of Thrones.’’’
A little later, someone driving a white van in the narrow streets of Shoreditch hit the brakes. ‘‘Agent Pena!’’ he said, referring to Pascal’s character in the Netflix series ‘‘Narcos.’’ ‘‘Excellent, mate.’’
At 41, Pascal is far from a household name, but fame is rushing at him. As he described it, he has gone from decades of anonymity to becoming the ‘‘aren’t you the guy from ... ?’’ guy.
Soon enough, fans might even get his name right.
In addition to his role on ‘‘Narcos,’’ Pascal appears in the recently released ‘‘The Great Wall,’’ a big-budget fantasy filmed mostly in Beijing. He will also have a lead role in the ‘‘Kingsman’’ sequel, set for release later this year.
After years of making ends meet with TV work and a prolific theater career, Pascal is not about to waste his chance. ‘‘The smallest of opportunities kept me going,’’ he said. ‘‘So much so that I resolved to struggle until I couldn’t walk anymore.’’
The change in his success means that Pascal has seen little of his apartment in West Hollywood, California, the past few years. He was in Europe for ‘‘Game of Thrones,’’ Colombia for ‘‘Narcos,’’ China for ‘‘The Great Wall’’ and London for ‘‘Kingsman.’’
Pascal was born in Santiago, Chile, and raised in San Antonio and Orange County, California. He grew up dreaming of movies — ‘‘I was the one who wouldn’t shut up about ‘Empire of the Sun,’’’ he said.
His parents fled Chile in the 1970s during the military junta and worked out a life of comfort in the United States. His father was a fertility doctor and his mother, a former child psychologist, handed him the keys to her Volvo when he turned 16.
His cozy adolescence was upended after he left for New York University, when his father, Dr. Jose Balmaceda, was ensnarled in a headlinemaking scandal involving the Orange County fertility clinic he ran with two other men. Pascal’s father, mother and two youngest brothers went to Chile. (Many people said Balmaceda fled the country; Pascal contends his father did nothing wrong.) Soon afterward, his mother died.
Pascal and his sister did not join the rest of the family, sharing a small apartment in Manhattan as he pursued acting work. Theater assignments piled up, as did a few TV roles, including oneoffs on ‘‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’’ and ‘‘Touched by an Angel.’’
Money was tight. At the Manhattan Theater Club, Pascal brought in about $515 a week.
‘‘The TV stuff means you’re getting, in about three to eight days of work, more money than an entire run Off Broadway,’’ he said. ‘‘And that’s not even a lot of money. You want ‘Law & Order’ so badly that you just want to die.’’