Slow burn

After years of grinding away at his acting career, Pedro Pascal is enjoying sudden fame and near-universal adulation thanks to his dual streaming blockbusters The Last of Us and The Mandalorian. Over a weekend in New York, he talks about all of it and everything that's coming next.

- By Dave Holmes. Photographs by Norman Jean Roy

"I AM GOING TO KILL YOU."

Pedro Pascal says this to me with a smile, which doesn't mean that he's joking. We're sitting across a table from each other and occupying two of the twenty seats at the tiny Tokyo Record Bar on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. A few days earlier, I had polled a handful of clued-in New Yorkers with the following question: "What's a good vinyl bar to take Pedro Pascal to?" Unanimous answer: Tokyo Record Bar! I was imagining a chill lounge space where we'd have some privacy to talk, play a few records, and maybe drink a little tequila. Pascal thought that's what it would be like, too. Which is not a coincidence because that's what I told him.

But Tokyo Record Bar is not that kind of place at all. Instead, it's a (very good!) seven-course meal in a (very cool!) basement with a (very delicious!) sake pairing. Meanwhile, it's six-thirty in the evening, and Pascal's got dinner plans with his "very bossy, please don't print that" little sister, Lux, at eight. The clock is ticking, and now we're locked into a whole experience. It feels a bit like the world's grooviest hostage crisis.

But it is an experience, and we're going to enjoy it. A reggae cover of Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough" spins on the turntable, and we sing along because it's impossible not to. We are suddenly aware that we're easily the oldest patrons in the house. "Is anyone in here thirty?" he asks, subtly gesturing around the room. "Maybe, but for sure nobody here is forty," I answer. The sake arrives, we fill each other's cups, we say cheers, his friendly eyes light up, and he leans in to tell me something.