When Pedro Pascal won the role of Oberyn Martell on the HBO series Game of Thrones last year, it should have been a highlight of his career, and it might well have been, had somebody remembered to tell him. After sending in two audition tapes, he flew to Northern Ireland from his home in Los Angeles at the request of that show’s creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss, nervous about what else he might have to do to secure the part. Then the congratulations began.
“I think they were under the impression that somebody had told me that they had stopped looking,” Pascal said. “I don’t think they knew that I didn’t know.”
Born Jose Pedro Balmaceda Pascal in Santiago, Chile, Pascal, 39, and his family became political refugees after the Pinochet coup. After living in Denmark and Texas, the family moved to Southern California, where Pascal entered the Orange County School of the Arts, because he didn’t fit in at the school he was supposed to attend.
“I was a nerd,” he said. “I was obsessed with drama and classic movies and reading plays, and I didn’t know how to surf.”
Small parts on short-lived TV series led to recurring roles on shows like Graceland and The Good Wife.
On Thrones, which begans its fourth season last Sunday, Pascal plays a prince of the House Martell known as the Red Viper, famed for his eight bastard daughters and his surreptitiously poisoned weaponry. When news of his casting reached the series faithful, an online kerfuffle ensued, with some fans claiming that the show’s creators had “whitewashed” a character that novelist George R.R. Martin had written as a dark-skinned man. Martin quickly defended the casting on his blog, saying that the Red Viper was intended to be “more Mediterranean than African in appearance”; in other words, not unlike the South American Pascal.
Pascal, as cheerful and self-effacing as Oberyn is not, spoke to Robert Ito over breakfast at a Los Angeles coffee shop. These are excerpts from the conversation.
How do you audition for a show that’s on another continent?
By iPhone. A friend came over and held my iPhone with his left hand and the pages in his right, and read with me.
Did you feel you had a decent shot at getting the part?
No. Early on, it didn’t seem like an attainable job to me. Once when I was reading the sides, I got to a particular scene, and I threw the sides up into the air, because I felt like my viewing experience was being ruined. It didn’t seem like a job that I was likely to get, so the only thing I was getting out of it were a lot of spoilers.
What was it like filming in Dubrovnik?
It looks like another planet. As a fan of the show, I always found the seascapes and the exteriors of Kings Landing so breathtaking that I just assumed that it was green screen. It’s not. It is exactly what the Adriatic looks like.
Did you get injured doing any of the fight scenes?
The worst of it was whacking myself with my own prop. I busted up my knees a lot trying to spin the thing from my left to my right. I whacked myself in the face several times. But I was never hurt by another actor or fight choreographer.
How do you get yourself in the mindset of a guy like the Red Viper?
Something that David and Dan said to me made so much sense: He does what he wants, when he wants, no matter what. Which is cool but not very sane. He’s not crazy. But it’s not normal to live your life without any compromises. And I think the Red Viper knows this and also knows that it isn’t necessarily going to be a very long life because of it. And he just doesn’t care.
People tend to go before their time on the show. Do you have a guarantee on how long you’ll last?
There are no guarantees in the telling of the story and the way that they want to tell it. Just like there are no guarantees in life, which is something that show reinforces over and over in the most brutal of ways.
