BRAVE HEART

PEDRO PASCAL'S emotional depth onscreen and his exuberance everywhere else have skyrocketed him to the top of the A-list and made him a sex symbol in middle age. A funny, sad, wildly honest talk with a star unlike any other

- BY KAREN VALBY

To his friends and family, he is PEPELO, PIPI. PEDDERS, and PEDS.

Years ago, on a movie set, someone started calling him PEPSI,which he loved.

Fans on the internet famously refer to him as Daddy or Zaddy, meaning he's a handsome, stylish older man they can imagine dominating them in a way they would not object to. In a 2022 video for Vanity Fair, part of the magazine's Lie Detector series, he laughed off the nickname. "Daddy is a state of mind," he said. "I'm your daddy." He was being playful, but his eye contact with the camera was so transfixing that some observers only heard the second sentence of that statement. Bella Ramsey—his young costar on The Last of Us, the show that truly catapulted him to stardom—disliked the "daddy" label the minute it was affixed to their friend: "I felt worried for him. I want to protect him from that whole joke of becoming the internet's daddy. I was like, 'I don't want everyone to refer to you as that and see you as that. You're so much more.' Ramsay calls him Pedge.

For simplicity's sake, I am going to call him Pedro Pascal.

Over lunch in London, Pascal is a grand raconteur who tells stories with his hands and uses funny voices and loves to swear and drink cocktails and murder a cheese plate, and he doesn't take himself too seriously. At the same time, he'll press right up against sad and raw and confusing parts of being alive. His insides are on his outsides. He cries easily. He laughs loudly.