Nurse Pascal does have a nice ring to it…
Pedro Pascal is admitting that he once considered becoming a nurse instead due to his struggle to find roles as an actor. Pascal told Vanity Fair that he had his “give up” years in his 20s and 30s while in New York.
“In my 30s I was supposed to have a career,” he says. “Past 29 without a career meant that it was over, definitely.”
However, Pascal’s friends and family would remind him that he was destined to be a star. “When Pedro would say, ‘I’m going to nursing school’ or ‘I’m going to be a theater teacher,’ it was just like ‘No, no, no, no! You’re too good!’” his older sister, Javiera Balmaceda, said. (Balmaceda is now also part of Hollywood and works as a producer at Amazon Studios.) “He’s wanted to be an actor since he was four years old. The one thing we’d never allow Pedro to do was give up.”
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And Pascal too can now admit that he wouldn’t have been the best nurse if he did go that route for his career. “I’d be a selective nurse, like I was as a waiter,” he said. “I’d fall in love with some patients and hate others. And that poor patient that I hated!”
Thankfully, Pascal has now become the It actor of the moment, appearing in a slew of films and TV series such as “The Last of Us” and “The Fantastic Four.” “Stepping into my 40s felt adult and empowered,” Pascal said. “Fifty felt more vulnerable — much more vulnerable. What a silly thing for a 50-year-old man — to have all this attention! This is such shadow-voice shit, you know what I mean?”
Pascal previously told Esquire that he had to wrestle with what he wanted his future as an actor to look like. “My vision of it was that if I didn’t have some major exposure by the time I was twenty-nine years old, it was over,” he said, “so I was constantly readjusting what it meant to commit my life to this profession, and giving up the idea of it looking like I thought it would when I was a kid. There were so many good reasons to let that delusion go.”
Pascal’s longtime pal Sarah Paulson remained one of his biggest champions, and pushed him to go forward. Paulson met Pascal when he was enrolled in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1993; she added to Esquire in 2023 that at the time, she would help financially support him during his early acting career. “He’s talked about this publicly, but there were times when I would give him my per diem from a job I was working on so that he could have money to feed himself,” Paulson said. “You just want him to succeed. And that to me, I feel like, is the sign of a major movie star.”
