As Kotaku’s resident Star Wars hater, I had no intention of seeing The Mandalorian and Grogu, so hearing that the first Star Wars movie since the cinematic war crime that was 2019’s Rise of Skywalker isn’t great doesn’t affect me much. However, I did see a trailer for the apparently middling movie while at the theater this weekend (Sheep Detectives is cute!), and for some reason, something in my brain broke when America’s sweetheart, Pedro Pascal, was unmasked on the screen and I noticed I did not instinctively feel happy to see him. But I like Pascal, right? He’s a modern day heartthrob who’s starred in a ton of cool projects like…the terrible Last of Us live-action show…and a mostly forgettable Marvel Cinematic Universe movie…and that bad Wonder Woman sequel where Gal Gadot yells at him through a windshield in a way that would seem like a microaggression if I didn’t know she was just a bad actor.
Wait, hold on. This is Pedro Pascal, though. He’s charming in interviews, vocal about important causes even when working for some of the biggest franchises in entertainment, and called Naughty Dog president Neil Druckmann out on his bullshit. I’m a big fan…of…his acting? Right? Okay let me pull up his filmography real quick. What was the last thing I really liked him in? 2022’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent? Oof. Okay. He was also fun in the Saturday Night Live skits he starred in?
Here’s the thing: Pascal’s meteoric rise to fame after becoming a major face in some of the biggest franchises in media, as well as his charismatic online persona and interviews, has put him in front of us for years almost non-stop. His appearance in The Mandalorian and Grogu was no doubt a contractual obligation after he’d played the titular bounty hunter on Disney+ for seven years, as is his appearance in December’s Avengers: Doomsday where he’ll reprise the role of stretchy superhero savant Reed Richards. He played Joel in The Last of Us with as much heart as showrunner Craig Mazin’s amateurish script would allow, but by and large, the stuff Pascal has been doing of late has pegged him as a stoic leading man when, historically, he actually seems to thrive most as a goofy uncle.
So Pascal is now at his most overexposed, and more often than not, he’s been promoting something middling at best, or downright bad at worst, and the end result is that even folks like me who, on paper, are fans, are starting to tire of him. In fairness, this would happen with any A-list celebrity who’s been on a non-stop press tour for one project or another for half a decade. But if he was in things that let him be as great as he was when he played an obsessive Nicolas Cage fan, maybe it would be a different story. I’m not saying that Pascal and his team need better discernment skills, as for all I know, he could be taking the fat checks and coasting on his newfound prominence because he’s a “lazy 50-year-old bougie bitch.” Or maybe it’s just bad timing, as a lot of these projects have been stacked on top of each other, and thus we don’t get a break from Pascal or these mediocre franchise entries.
In between these big blockbusters, he’s taken on smaller projects like Past Lives director Celine Song’s perfectly serviceable rom-com Materialists and Ari Aster’s polarizing covid-era ensemble film Eddington, so it’s not as if he’s not taking swings in between his high-profile appearances in noted low points on the extended universe assembly line, which get more attention and exposure than any of the more interesting work he might be doing. It looks like he’s taking some bigger risks soon, having stepped up to play the lead in Todd Haynes’ upcoming “explicit” gay romance film De Noche after Joaquin Phoenix left the project and cost the production a ton of money. Hopefully that one gets to exist without being overshadowed by his appearance in any Marvel movie.
Maybe it’s just the nature of the film industry right now that talented people end up circling the drain in the Disney vault, where taking a role often means years of steady work. I just hope that after years of starring in things that feel like contractual obligations, Pascal can go away for a while, and come back with better material. He’s gotta be sitting on enough cash from the Star Wars factory to star in things that are good.
