Pedro Pascal

José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal was born on April 2, 1975, in Santiago, Chile, to Verónica Pascal Ureta, a child psychologist, and José Balmaceda Riera, a reproductive endocrinologist. He has an older sister, film and television producer Javiera Balmaceda, a younger sister, actress Lux, and a younger brother. His paternal grandmother, Juanita, was born in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Pascal is the great-nephew of Laura Allende, a politician and sister of Chilean President Salvador Allende, and the second cousin of Socialist Party politician Denise Pascal and sociologist Andrés Pascal Allende, a former Secretary General of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left.

Two years before Pascal's birth, General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende, establishing a military dictatorship. Both of Pascal's parents were designated enemies of the state by the Pinochet regime. The family sought refuge in the Venezuelan embassy in Santiago for six months before fleeing Chile when Pascal was nine months old. They subsequently received political asylum in Denmark before settling in the United States, where Pascal was raised in San Antonio, Texas. When he was eleven, the family relocated to Orange County, California. His parents returned to Chile in 1995 after his father was accused of stealing fertility patients' eggs and embryos and implanting them in other women without their knowledge or consent.

Pascal pursued acting at the Orange County School of the Arts, graduating in 1993, and went on to attend New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he graduated in 1997. Following his mother's death, he adopted her surname professionally, both as a tribute to her and because he found that Americans had difficulty pronouncing his paternal surname, Balmaceda. He is a member of New York City's LAByrinth Theater Company and has performed in classical and contemporary theatrical works. He received the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award and the Garland Award for his role in the International City Theater production of Orphans. In 2010, he wrote the play Flaca Loves Bone, directed by Sarah Silverman, about four siblings who meet in a snowy wood to uncover a family secret. That same year, he made his directorial debut with Killing Play, written by David Anzuelo, at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, where he also directed underneathmybed and Yosemite.

Early in his screen career, Pascal appeared in small roles on television series including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, NYPD Blue, The Good Wife, Nurse Jackie, and Homeland. During this period he also worked waiting at restaurants and, by his own account, was fired from such jobs close to ten times. His close friend Sarah Paulson provided him with her per diem money so he could afford food during times of extreme financial hardship. A residual check from his role on Buffy the Vampire Slayer helped stabilize his finances at a point when he had less than seven dollars in his bank account. His feature film debut came in 2005 in Julia Solomonoff's Sisters, for which he was then credited as Balmaceda.

Pascal's breakthrough came in 2014 when he portrayed Oberyn Martell in the fourth season of HBO's Game of Thrones, a role that earned him a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination as part of the ensemble cast for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series. The following year, he joined the Netflix crime drama Narcos as Javier Peña, a character based on a real-life DEA agent, a role he continued through the series' third season while also serving as narrator. In 2016, he appeared alongside Matt Damon in Zhang Yimou's fantasy action film The Great Wall, portraying mercenary Pero Tovar. He played operative Jack Daniels, also known as Agent Whiskey, in Matthew Vaughn's 2017 film Kingsman: The Golden Circle, and appeared in The Equalizer 2 in 2018 and Triple Frontier in 2019.

Pascal achieved international stardom through two major television roles. Beginning in 2019, he starred as Din Djarin in the Disney+ science fiction series The Mandalorian, a role he continued through 2023. In 2023, he began starring as Joel Miller in HBO's post-apocalyptic drama series The Last of Us, a performance that earned him a SAG Award for Outstanding Male Actor in a Drama Series, along with nominations for a Golden Globe Award and four Primetime Emmy Awards. Both roles contributed to his reputation for portraying adoptive father figures. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2023.

His film work includes Wonder Woman 1984 in 2020, voice work for the animated film The Wild Robot in 2024, and Gladiator II in 2024. He is also set to appear in Materialists and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, both in 2025.

On stage, Pascal made his Broadway debut in 2019, playing Edmund in an adaptation of King Lear.