We’re in the midst of a Hot Boy Summer, but the “Hot Boy” is singular and his name is Pedro Pascal: He of silly little cardigans and fun eyeglasses and the sort of effortless charm and banter that makes you understand why talk-show interviews were invented to begin with. Most actors spend their entire careers working for a year half as packed as Pascal’s: The Last of Us season two. Materialists. Eddington. And now, the hotly anticipated Marvel film Fantastic Four: First Steps. Pascal’s rise has been so meteoric over the past couple of years that it’s easy to forget that his profile first skyrocketed nearly a decade ago when he popped up in season four of Game of Thrones as the magnetic Oberyn Martell. That one-season run (spoiler alert) thrust him into the spotlight in ways we’re still seeing pay off all this time later. What’s even easier to forget is that Pascal didn’t burst onto the scene in Thrones — he’d been carving out a living as an actor for decades, popping up in TV shows and films across genres and formats.

It’s rare that a breakout star of the moment has a filmography so full of weird side quests and paycheck gigs, roles in legendary failed pilots and disaster pieces. The Pedro Pascal Project doesn’t begin in 2015 — for those looking for an at least semi-complete look at the career of one of our great leading men of the moment, get ready to get weird with ten of Pedro Pascal’s most off-kilter and surprising roles.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

One of Pascal’s earliest television roles was a one-episode appearance on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as college freshman Eddie, one of Buffy’s classmates. It’s a good episode that fans of the series are sure to be familiar with, but it’s far more notable in the Pedro Pascal Story for the way he’s talked about the role in the years since. As a young actor the residuals from this appearance kept him from losing his apartment over the years, and he often speaks glowingly of his experience working with series star Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Law & Order/Law & Order: Criminal Intent/Law & Order: SVU

There’s a certain rite of passage for any working actor in the New York area. Two words: Law. Order. For decades it’s been a reliable gig for anyone in need of a solid paycheck, SAG-friendly work, and the chance to properly appear not only on television but on one of the premiere franchises in all of entertainment. It’s such a reliable gig, in fact, that some actors come back for more. Years pass, faces change, and Dick Wolf’s world isn’t beholden to MCU-esque continuity. A corpse in one episode may pop up as a witness or murderer a few seasons down the line.

Count Pascal among them. He appeared on Law & Order: Criminal Intent twice (2006, 2009), Law & Order in 2008, and Law & Order: SVU in 2011. That’s — count ’em — not one, not two, not three, but four entire separate Pedro Pascals in one fictional universe. We should be so lucky as to live in one like it.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle

Far from an under-seen gem, but largely forgotten in the years since its release, Kingsman: The Golden Circle is the sequel to Kingsman: The Secret Service, the smash-hit British espionage action ripper directed by Matthew Vaughn. The sequel got a souped-up cast that saw names like Channing Tatum, Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges, and Halle Berry jump on as well as Pascal. At the time of his casting he was riding the red-hot waves of his Thrones run and leveraged that momentum into a prominent supporting role in what should have been a sure-thing next step.

It wasn’t. This movie stinks. It stinks so bad that when it came time to make a third Kingsman film they jumped back in time to do a World War I-era period piece, seemingly to get as far away from the stench of The Golden Circle as chronologically possible. These days it’s been effectively memoryholed, which is perhaps to Pascal’s benefit.

Wonder Woman Pilot

Remember that David E. Kelley Wonder Woman TV pilot that was shot for the CW way back in like, 2011? The high-profile one starring Adrianne Palicki, Cary Elwes, Elizabeth Hurley, and yes, Pedro Pascal? You don’t? Well, I guess your brain’s hard drive isn’t as crammed full of useless late-aughts/early-2010s superhero multimedia information as mine is. I very much remember this pilot, which is currently viewable online and several other platforms and also if you go to any comic convention there’ll be a guy selling pirated DVDs of ’80s cartoons, assorted Japanese tokusatsu, the Roger Corman Fantastic Four movie, and this pilot. You don’t need to buy it. I just told you it’s online.

Anyways, Pedro Pascal is in this as Ed Indelicato, a cop from the comics who’s friendly with Diana of Themyscira. Almost a decade later, Pascal would appear as Maxwell Lord in the blockbuster Wonder Woman: 1984 and I genuinely wonder which of these two projects he prefers because this is a real mixed bag of Wonder Women. He should get in touch with James Gunn. Maybe the third time’s the charm.

Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe

Did you know that in 2011, right in the middle of Burn Notice’s seven-year run on the USA Network, series star Jeffrey Donovan directed a made-for-TV-movie origin story for Bruce Campbell’s supporting lead, Sam Axe? Do these words mean anything to you? What about the words “Commandante Veracruz”? Because that’s the name of Pedro Pascal’s dubious character who’s introduced as an ally to Sam Axe on a mission in Colombia. Bruce Campbell as a Navy SEAL in mid-aughts Colombia getting wrapped up in a drug-trade scheme? Sounds very racially sensitive; we should all watch it together.

Graceland

I’m putting my professional reputation as an arbiter of taste (people call me this, often) on the line with this one: Graceland is Good Actually. Another USA Network original that aired in the mid-2010s, the series followed the lives of undercover operatives from various government agencies who all lived in the same SoCal beach house while they’re working under their assumed identities. The cast has great chemistry, everyone’s obscenely hot (Brandon Jay McLaren! Daniel Sunjata! Serinda Swan! Vanessa Ferlito!), and there’s just enough soapy intrigue to keep you entertained on a lazy summer afternoon.

Pascal had a recurring role as Juan Badillo, a hard-ass FBI officer who spends the series pushing Aaron Tveit’s Mike to look deeper into his housemate Briggs (Sunjata), who’s suspected of being a mole. It’s not the showy sort of work people have come to love from Pascal, but it’s a totally solid role that stands out on a really fun summer show. If you missed it during its three-season run, it’s worth the binge for the Pascal of it all and more.

Bloodsucking Bastards

A quiet release from 2015, Bloodsucking Bastards is the brainchild of the Dr. God comedy group and stars Pascal alongside Whedonite favorite Fran Kranz. Think of this one as Office Space with vampires, a silly and wildly gory B-movie bloodfest that happens to feature one of the most exciting actors working in 2025 as a middle-management vampire — and not metaphorically speaking.

Triple Frontier

One of the biggest bets of Netflix’s pre-COVID run saw director J.C. Chandor (Margin Call, A Most Violent Year) grab several of Hollywood’s most compelling leading men at the moment (Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal, Charlie Hunnam, and Garrett Hedlund, plus an early Adria Arjona) and cast them in a gritty ’80s action throwback called Triple Frontier. It was a big play that seemed like a sure thing. In actuality? It’s uh … fine! It’s nowhere near as great as it should have been or could have been, with most of the film’s legacy these days just being the incredible press tour Isaac and Pascal (longtime friends) went on to promote it.

The Great Wall

Among the strangest blockbusters of the past decade, The Great Wall was a Chinese production helmed by Zhang Yimou, one of the great Chinese filmmakers of his generation. (In looking into him for this story, I found that there is a section in the personal-life tab of his Wikipedia that is simply labeled ‘Feud’ and I think that’s awesome.) The story is sort of like Pacific Rim as a period piece, dropping an alien invasion right in the middle of the Song dynasty, and stars Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal as soldiers of fortune who get wrapped up in the Chinese army’s fight against the alien forces.

This movie isn’t very good, and around the time of its release it caught quite a lot of flack for placing two non-Asian actors at the center of an otherwise very Asian blockbuster. It’s probably worth reiterating that this was very much a Chinese production top to bottom and the casting of Damon and Pascal was largely in the interest of creating a proper global hit that would have legs in the North American market. Between that and lukewarm-at-best reviews, it ended up something of a fiscal calamity that most involved parties moved on from quickly and quietly.

The Adjustment Bureau

The Great Wall wasn’t the first time Matt Damon starred in a weird movie with Pedro Pascal. George Nolfi’s 2011 oddity The Adjustment Bureau is based on a Philip K. Dick short story and on its surface seems like a cool high-concept The Da Vinci Code–adjacent political thriller about mysterious men in suits, conspiracies, and Illuminati-esque systems of control. Damon stars as a young politician whose dalliance with a ballerina played by Emily Blunt turns their world to chaos for reasons they never could have imagined.

Sounds cool, right? That’s what I thought when I saw one of the strangest mainstream releases of my young adulthood, I’m so serious. It’s hard to talk about the choices this movie makes without sounding like I’m having a stroke but here goes. The little fedoras are the thing that let the suit guys travel through time and space, and at the end it turns out they might be angels? And at one point Matt Damon wears the stupid little fedora and gets angel powers? But he doesn’t look like an angel, he just looks like Matt Damon in a little fuck-ass fedora? (Spoiler alert I guess?) Anyway this movie is so weird and also super-schmaltzy in a way even I find pretty off-putting, and I’m decrying that schmaltz as an unabashed fan of the Netflix original film Love at First Sight.

Pedro Pascal plays a maître d’ and is in the movie for ten seconds. Here, see for yourself.

Related

• Pedro ‘Protect the Dolls’ Pascal Let J.K. Rowling Have It
• Pedro Pascal Comes Out as Domingo’s Gay Brother on SNL
• Oscar Isaac Wants Pedro Pascal in the Spider-Verse

 And nine other early, obscure, and just plain weird roles that Pedro Pascal took before he became the Hot Boy of the summer.