Even though current internet “daddy” Pedro Pascal has been kicking around Hollywood since the late ‘90s, he firmly became a household name when he starred on Season 4 of Game of Thrones as the lusty, dueling and soon very memorably dead Prince Oberyn Martell. The actor previously admitted that his role as The Viper changed his life, but has (since that appearance) stepped right into a number of additional ginormous franchises with millions of fans. Now, he’s opened up about nabbing all those lofty parts and how he’s countered the pressure that comes with them.
What Did Pedro Pascal Say About Combatting The Fear That Comes From Joining Major Franchises?
If anyone knows about the pressures that can be put upon an actor because of a fandom, it would be Pedro Pascal. In just over a decade, the Materialists star (who recently made folks swoon by quoting lines from Pride & Prejudice) has appeared in the aforementioned HBO fantasy hit, along with movies or series like Wonder Woman 1984, The Mandalorian and The Last of Us, which recently completed Season 2 on the 2025 TV schedule.
Pascal is also staring down the barrel of the opening for an upcoming Marvel movie, the highly anticipated The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which arrives as one of the 2025 movies this summer. The Reed Richards actor even got some fan backlash over his casting in that role, and during CinemaBlend’s visit to the set while he was filming that project he did admit to his work in each franchise being “scarier” than the last, and said:
Each time you step into one, and you feel like this can't be scarier, you find out, ‘Oh, this is scarier.’ And then you find out, ‘No, this is scarier!’ I guess it kind of feels like that, actually. I was going into Game of Thrones, going into DC, going into Star Wars and then the entire gaming world, that introduced itself to me in the best way. Because I learned very, very quickly the incredible medium of storytelling that's happening within gaming. And then the crown top of the mountain feels like stepping into something like this.
We can’t deny the potential for fear and pressure from fans when taking on a role in something like the massive and long-standing world of Star Wars (Pascal will also star in the upcoming film The Mandalorian and Grogu). But, at least The Mandalorian Season 1 introduced new characters to the universe and looked at a time period that hadn’t been thoroughly explored before, so any fan expectations couldn’t point to many specifics about what they wanted to see. Becoming Mister Fantastic, though? That’s a much different story, especially when people loved John Krasinski’s brief stint as the beloved character relatively recently.
Late last year, when the star was preparing for the release of Gladiator II, he said that he has to focus on whatever story he’s helping to tell to deal with fan expectations as he’s working in these giant franchises. He added to that during the set visit, and said that he also relies on the day-in/day-out work with everyone behind the scenes:
And yeah, it does get kind of scary every time. But that's why the lucky thing is to anchor yourself so completely to a partnership, to your colleagues, to the original authorship of this particular telling of The Fantastic Four under, basically, the best in the business. It holds you, and really, really can be the perfect antidote to the fear, to the pressure and stuff like that.
Simply dealing with the business of telling the story you signed on for and working with a group of people who have the same goal seems difficult to do under such circumstances, but it appears that Pascal has mastered it. And, it’s a good thing, because he’ll also bring his MCU superhero to the 2026 film, Avengers: Doomsday, so that pressure is unlikely to end soon.
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