“If you could hear it, you would think I was killing an animal.”
That’s Pedro Pascal on his cello playing, more than a year after he started lessons for a movie that hadn’t been greenlit yet. The star first had lunch with Tony Gilroy in late July 2025 about taking on the lead role of his latest movie, “Behemoth!.” But even before anything was signed, and before he knew whether the project would hold together, Pascal went straight to cellists Timothy Loo and Charlie Tyler and got to work.
Cameras would eventually roll across Los Angeles at the end of that October, with a final day in Vienna. Every lunch break and short weekend went to “the next thing, and the next thing.” Pascal calls it “a highly intense lip sync” that left him back-footed for the entire shoot, and “the hardest thing that I’ve ever done.”
It was also his favorite filmmaking experience ever. “I miss ‘Behemoth!’ more than I miss anything I’ve ever done,” he tells Variety. “I miss the character.”
We’ve waited a long time for Pascal to play a part like Alex Serian. I suspect a lot of Latinos felt the same.
Pascal, 51, spent two decades in small roles onstage and on television before HBO’s fantasy epic “Game of Thrones” changed his life at 39. He then became the internet’s shared boyfriend through Disney+’s “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian” and HBO’s post-apocalyptic drama “The Last of Us.” No one gave him a part worthy of what he can do with his face when he has no lines.
Alex, a gifted cellist who comes home to Los Angeles after 20 years on the road, is that part. The Searchlight Pictures film, written and directed by Gilroy, premiered as the centerpiece selection of the New York Film Festival on Oct. 2 and opens Dec. 4. It refuses to reveal what it’s actually about until well past the midpoint.
On this episode of the Variety Awards Circuit Podcast, Pascal digs into Gilroy’s ode to movie composers and a character who says more with a bow than he ever does with words. He also coughs up a line from the upcoming “Avengers: Doomsday,” teases his role in Todd Haynes’ anticipated “De Noche” and sends a message to his friend and favorite awards-season foe, Kieran Culkin.
Before that, the return of the Awards Circuit roundtable looks at this season’s Oscars contenders, including whether Nathan Fielder’s “You Can See Everything” is taking on frontrunner status over “The Odyssey.”
Listen below.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I wrote that this is the role I’ve waited a long time for you to play. Thank God Tony Gilroy is alive and well.
He is a spy for the rebellion. Tony kind of blows my mind. He’s so skilled at so many classical elements, classical music being a huge part of this movie and he’s so innovative and progressive in the way he deals with narrative structure while painting completely whole human beings. In my research, and in my love of him now that I’ve gotten to work with him, there’s something I pay even more attention to as I revisit everything he’s written. “Dolores Claiborne,” in 1995, is a manifesto on misogyny. At the time that didn’t feel new, but within the thriller genre, its intelligence around such a real issue left a mark on me. It’s like school in a way. As personal and intimate as this story is, there’s something really rebellious about it and a little anarchistic, in insisting that you pay such close attention to this life puzzle that anyone can have if they want to reflect on their own lives and hear the music of it and let the music guide you into revelations about yourself.
The film doesn’t reveal what it’s really about until maybe 65 or 70% in, and it subverts every expectation of what a drama about classical music could be. You do so much acting with your face. I cried at the end because of a face you make in a pivotal scene. Was it harder to go through this story without a lot of words to show what you’re feeling?
I loved it more than anything I’ve gotten to do. I guess because there are fewer lines to learn. [laughs]
There was so much language in the cello playing that speaks for the character. He’s very obviously someone who expresses himself through his music and fails at so many things in life because he doesn’t know how to speak the language of human relationships. He knows how to navigate his own life and express himself through playing the cello. That was something I understood really deeply and had empathy for. I’m somebody who talks a lot and uses a lot of words and loves language, but I related to this untethered, nomadic person whose skill beyond playing the cello is adaptability to survive. That was a deep connection for me.
The homework, beyond the insane technical challenge of looking like I played the cello convincingly, was understanding Tony and the story he was telling. It’s funny, because we recently noticed, while taking the train together, that we’re talking a lot more about Alex Serian than we ever did while shooting the movie.
That happened organically?
Completely organically. Tony puts so much faith in the people he hires, and I think that faith is a form of leadership that invites your most devoted work. He’ll say it’s pragmatic, which I totally understand, because as a leader you want your crew and your cast to give you their best. At the same time, it’s this very warm and exciting invitation to be inside the story without having to talk about it too much. I was given all this permission to step into a day of shooting, into a scene, into pivotal or subtle moments of this very interesting arc the character is on, without talking to Tony about it first. The only time he’d come in and make little adjustments, suggestions even, he would always start with, “I don’t want to fuck with this. But do you think maybe we can put a smile on this?” And he didn’t mean my face. He meant internally, energetically. It was a fascinating dance of trust.
I would say it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, because of the cello. But it was also the most nurturing and rewarding experience: playing someone so private, with a camera on him and knowing that everything he doesn’t share with the people orbiting him in the story is being shared with the audience. It’s an interesting kind of present vulnerability that you had to show up for all the time. As recessive as he may feel, the audience is with him. I can’t hide anything from you guys. Anything he doesn’t understand himself, even if he’s looking at something that’s a big reveal and we as an audience aren’t meant to know what he’s seeing, because he doesn’t know how to process what he’s seeing in that moment.
Olivia Wilde slays in this movie. I thought she was going to murder you.
She was my favorite character on the page, and that we got Olivia was, as Tony would say, the movie gods smiling upon us. Coming in and slaying the hell out of the scene.
How much did you see of yourself in Alex? You’re famous, you’re surrounded by people constantly. Did you feel a connection to what it’s like to be lonely?
This is what I find so fascinating, and it’s why I’m talking so much more about him now. I don’t want to use the word “defending” him, but I’m sharing what I understand of him, because I don’t believe he lacks connections or doesn’t know how to connect. What he cannot meet in many of his relationships is a certain expectation of him that goes beyond the realm of a language he knows how to speak. Without it being calculating, he does choose to be in relationships that have their guardrails set in place. Love with a woman who is in a relationship. Nonattachments. Out of his own fear of bringing anyone into his inherited pain and his inherited dysfunction. He’s not somebody to blame his parents. He just is who he is, and he’s doing his best.
The second language he’s very good at is intimacy. Not emotional intimacy, but he can express himself through, I guess, lovemaking. That’s why there are so many relationships in the movie that I feel have very real connections. It just doesn’t come into commitment. There are people who, let’s say, put a demand on him: “I need you to say something, because I’m not willing to say it.” He doesn’t know how to say it, but it isn’t necessarily fair to demand that he be the one to say it.
You had never picked up a cello. Why are you good at everything?
I’m bad at a lot of things. If you could hear it, you would think I was killing an animal.
You can’t just let the bow slide up and down the strings. It has to be primed to press against the string and attempt to play the note. But to marry all of it, the bowing with the fingering and the different positions and the vibrato, is a lifelong endeavor that lifelong cellists are struggling with to this very day. My teachers suffer at the hands of it even now. So it was a highly, highly, highly intense lipsync, shatteringly difficult and I felt back-footed the entire time.
I had an intensive period before we started shooting. I had lunch with Tony in late July, and we started toward the end of October. Before anything was signed, as soon as I understood there was a green light, whether it would fall apart or not, I didn’t care. I went straight into my lessons with Timothy Loo and Charlie Tyler, these incredible musicians. Then when we started shooting, whatever window we had, whatever lunch, whatever short day, weekend, I was learning the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. It was crazy. The very last day of shooting was in Vienna, but we spent every day of the shoot all over Los Angeles, which had its own magic.
What a concept, to shoot a movie about L.A. in L.A …
So many locations. We were in Pasadena. We were in Studio City. We were in Malibu. We were in the Arts District. We were downtown. Getting to take a break and feel integrated into the city, then go home at the end of the day, was a dream experience. Everyone felt it. The whole crew was local. Damián García, our brilliant cinematographer, lives in Barcelona and our incredible producer Sanne Wohlenberg lives in London, but everyone else, all the department heads, were Los Angeles, if not Angelenos. Major legacy industry people who had worked on the most incredible things. We were all very in love.
Tony told me it would’ve been a lie to make this movie about the business and not shoot it here.
When you talk about Olivia Wilde tearing into the movie the instant she steps on-screen, that’s a perfect example of movie magic we haven’t talked about enough. That scene takes place in Chicago, but we shot it in downtown Los Angeles. It was not cold, and it was not snowing. It is an operatic blizzard happening in this movie. That’s down to our incredible camera department and production design. And Mary Zophres, the costume designer, picked out that emerald green dress for Olivia and worked with me on every detail. What Alex is wearing isn’t necessarily something you notice, but it has everything to do with the gentle nature in which he tries to exist in the world.
The last scene we see of him, in the cathedral, that sweater. He seems so calm, so at peace. And when he’s running through the house, the white shirt and the bow tie, he feels like a man on a mission. As close as we’ll get to you playing James Bond.
The white shirt and bow tie don’t hurt. It’s all so intentional. Everything I wore was this collaborative, gorgeous conversation with Mary. I can’t say enough about everybody who worked on the movie.
You spent about two decades taking small roles onstage and on television before “Game of Thrones” changed everything. You were 39. Someone out there is in those forming years, waiting for that moment. What do you wish someone had told you back then?
I was thinking about a different version of this today, weirdly. One of the first things I got to do when the season was airing was go back to my roots and play Don John in “Much Ado About Nothing” at Shakespeare in the Park, which Jack O’Brien directed. I caught myself thinking about that very, very pivotal year of my life, one I’d been waiting for ever since I left high school and how much I missed it. Then I was thinking about how much I missed shooting “The Last of Us” in Alberta and sharing “The Last of Us” with the world. And then: I miss “Behemoth!” I miss “Behemoth!” more than I miss anything I’ve ever done. I miss the character. I miss being with everyone every day. I miss Tony. And I was thinking, you’re going to look back, so be very present today, because it’s only going to take a couple of years to miss this. Pay attention. Enjoy it.
What I would tell anyone is that if you’re waking up every day and trying, and some days that means not doing anything at all, but you have intention behind your pursuit, you’re in love with what you’re pursuing and you’re pursuing it in your own way, you are exactly where you’re supposed to be. Have faith in that. I think it’s a huge mistake if you feel like you need to mold yourself into something that doesn’t feel true to yourself, or meet an expectation that even fractionally feels like some kind of internal betrayal.
You’ve got to eat shit, and you’ve got to take a lot of shit. That’s part of it. It’s a huge part of it for me, because it forms character, hopefully in the direction of knowing how to treat other people and protecting the value of generosity, because it comes around. There isn’t any way I would be here were it not for the generosity of others who have been there for me. I owe it to all the people in my life. I wouldn’t know where to begin. It’s a population of people that I owe things to.
It makes me think of the finale of “The Office,” when Andy says “I wish there was a way to know you’re in ‘the good old days’, before you’ve actually left them.”
That’s exactly what I was thinking about today.
I was in bed, and I saw the premiere of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV and I just didn’t blink. “What is this?” I remember the first time I saw Tracy Chapman. I remember the first time I saw Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” and just being changed.
When I was a kid, I was so into Motown. I was so into classic rock. I had my whole period with Bob Dylan and the Doors and Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. God, Roberta Flack. I walked two miles to get the 1978 self-titled album once I’d heard “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” But through the lens of my nephews, I see how much access the young generation has to express themselves through social media, which has its advantages and its dangers. Major dangers. But it’s also a very important tool of expression, or at least, for older people like us, a way of bearing witness to what their experience is, what their needs are. I’m really excited about young people seeing this movie, even though it’s old farts making it, because there’s something so relatable about evaluating your own life and realizing it has its own music, its own movie. If you follow that music, there are surprises.
You’re famously generous on red carpets and in interviews. When people ask what it’s like to interview you, I say you’re exactly the way you imagine him to be. The internet has turned you into a kind of “shared boyfriend.” Uly Morazan, who’s a content creator and makes videos about you, is a great example of that. Everyone feels they can connect with you. Does that version of Pedro make it harder to disappear into someone like Alex?
Oh my god, I love Uly. It’s not harder for me at all, because I think so dramaturgically about work. That’s my training and the way my brain works. There are so many different types of actors. There are actors who can live in the perspective of their character so completely that I envy them sometimes. There are actors who are writers, even though they don’t write and can save a character and elevate a character through their own contributions of language. There are actors who think producerially and see the whole picture and their place in it. The challenge would come from anyone who sees me in a particular way and hasn’t seen me do something like this. But something like this is a thing I’ve been dreaming about my whole life.
And in its own tiny way, I’ve gotten to play very rich roles in tiny theaters all around the country through my theater career and my years as a member of Labyrinth Theater Company in New York. So the short answer is no. It’s a lot harder to step into Marvel or a beloved video game. You have to be realistic about those expectations and also protect the personal authorship you’re ultimately going to want to share with an audience that’s either new to the project or beloved fans of it. That’s a fascinating balance to understand and study, because you can’t betray anything about yourself. It just won’t be true. You have to accept that you’re not going to meet everybody’s expectations, but you do have to take expectation into account, because these are people who understand the material in a way that’s very important for you to understand when you go into it.
I was told you can tell me almost everything about “Avengers” and the Todd Haynes film. So tell me everything.
You want me to tell you everything about “Doomsday” and “Secret Wars” together? They are about the Avengers and major events that all of us are a part of.
I asked David Harbour, who sat in that very spot, for one line his character says, completely out of context. Give me a line from “Avengers.”
I’m trying not to pick the line that’s in the trailer … “It’s good to see you again.”
And Todd Haynes’ “De Noche?”
“De Noche” has its own movie gods, one of them being Todd Haynes. It’s a sister film for me, emotionally anyway, in terms of how special it is to me. For both of them, there were only these windows for them to be made and to be able to fly in through that window together is its own sort of magic. To me, it was a movie that had to be made, a Todd Haynes movie that had to be made, just like this is a Tony Gilroy movie that had to be made.
Kieran Culkin isn’t in a film this year, and I’m going to miss the banter you both shared during “The Last of Us” and while he was on the circuit for “Succession.” If you had a message for Mr. Culkin, what would it be?
Oh, Kieran … He’s not going to listen to this, so I’ll text it to him.
“Come here, Kieran. Let’s cuddle.”
10 QUESTIONS WITH PEDRO PASCAL
What’s your childhood nickname?
“Pepelo.” If I had grown up in Chile, I would be Papelo.
Something you loved as a kid that you can’t believe you were into?
I think I love everything I was into. But I fell for Cabbage Patch Kids, and now I’m like, why?
My father-in-law fell for the Beanie Babies revolution. Thought they’d be worth a gazillion dollars.
That was a craze, though. I moved on to Garbage Pail Kids, and I don’t regret that at all.
Go-to karaoke or shower song?
“La Bamba.” But I don’t do karaoke.
Not even at a friend’s house?
I’ve done “La Bamba” for friends.
So I just need to get invited. Secret talent?
I have few secrets and very, very few talents. I used to know how to juggle. Can’t juggle anymore. Just tried. Big mistake. I’m good at laundry.
You fold well?
Fold well.
Favorite ice cream flavor?
Chocolate Häagen-Dazs. Without question.
Mine is cookies and cream Häagen-Dazs.
That’s my second, bro. If it’s not chocolate, the closest second is cookies and cream Häagen-Dazs.
The one item you can’t live without?
Something my mother made me.
What TV show or film in history do you wish you’d been a cast member of?
I wish I was in “The Lost Boys.” Can I also say “Twin Peaks?”
Did you see “The Lost Boys” musical?
No, but I heard it’s amazing. Michael Arden is a friend of mine. We worked together on “King Lear,” and he’s an incredible director.
Fictional character you most relate to or admire?
Did you ever see “My Life as a Dog?” Ingemar, in Lasse Hallström’s movie.
I had chills for a second, because my answer to that is usually “My Life,” with Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman. Nobody talks about that movie. I think it’s Keaton’s finest hour. Favorite piece of advice, given or received?
It’s corny as hell, and it’s a verse from Shakespeare. But to thine own self be true.
Variety’s “Awards Circuit” podcast, hosted by Clayton Davis, Jazz Tangcay, Emily Longeretta and Michael Schneider, who also produces, is your one-stop source for lively conversations about the best in film and television. Each episode, “Awards Circuit” features interviews with top film and TV talent and creatives, discussions and debates about awards races and industry headlines and much more. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or anywhere you download podcasts.