Troy Baker celebrates Pedro Pascal for EW's 2023 Entertainers of the Year: 'He's just so damn good in everything'
Troy Baker, who originated the role of Joel in the "Last of Us" video game, pays tribute to series star — and "Internet Daddy" — Pedro Pascal.
Pedro Pascal has long been one of the internet's favored "daddies," dating back to his turn as sex-positive bisexual Oberyn Martell on HBO's Game of Thrones in 2014. It's just now he has a whole Saturday Night Live sketch about it in the year 2023, which proved to be the actor's biggest of his career thus far despite an already meteoric rise. With Pascal in a starring lead role as Joel, the commercially and critically adored The Last of Us TV adaptation of the popular video games kicked off a streak for the actor that included a part in a Pedro Almodovar short film, a history book-making SNL hosting gig, and multiple Emmy nominations.
In a passing-of-the-torch moment, Troy Baker, the actor who originated the role of Joel and helped make the Last of Us video games so beloved in the first place, salutes Pascal for giving new meaning to his character.
Pascal: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Disney; Baker: Rich Polk/Stringer
Troy Baker celebrates Pedro PascalThe thing about Pedro is that he's just so damn good in everything that he's done. And we were fortunate enough to be able to get him at such a time after Narcos, after Game of Thrones, right after The Mandalorian, and people are just loving him. No one's saying, "He's in too much." They're like, "We want more of him."
Then you look underneath the surface and you realize that this is someone who plays the heart of the character so authentically, and that's what's required of Joel. Pedro didn't play the Texas, he didn't play the gritty survivor. He just was. He sat so comfortably in the role, and I knew that inherently that's what he was going to bring to it.... What I did not expect from Pedro was these moments of vulnerability that genuinely made me angry [laughs], these opportunities and insights into these moments that he was living in so fully that it — based upon his experience as an actor, his lived experience as a human — resulted in a different character choice, a different actor choice. One of my favorite ones was when, in episode 102, Tess shows him the bite. If you watch in the game, [it's the kind of moment] where someone tells you something so awful that you just have to laugh at it. And what Pedro did, the second that Tess reaches for that, he flinches — and it was not scripted, it's just an authentic choice. It's choices like that that are peppered all the way throughout season 1, and I know that we'll see more of that in season 2. That's what I didn't expect. I was hoping that Pedro would show me something about Joel that I missed, and damned if he didn't do that in every episode.
I knew that we were in good hands when I saw his performance — even before; his pedigree speaks for itself. I knew that I was going to love him when we first met. We were shooting up in Waterton (in southwestern Alberta, Canada), where we were shooting for our Silver Lake, and it was snowing and it was really cold outside and there was nowhere to go. We took over the town and we were all eating in the hotel lobby restaurant. There were a couple of windows that were behind me, and he passed by and he saw me... he walked in and he's standing there freezing, covered in snow, and I'm just warm by the fire. We looked at each other — it's kind of like the Spider-Man meme; we're just pointing at each other. And I was like, "Come here, man," and we just hugged for a second. I just grabbed him by the shoulders and I said, "I have so many questions for you." And he looked at me and goes, "I have none for you." [Laughs] And I was like, "Your humor and I — we vibe, we vibe 100 percent."
Every time I've ever been around him, I just feel like I'm getting Pedro. I'm not getting this cult of personality. I'm just getting the person, which I find very, very refreshing. And I don't know if that's because he's being that way with me — and I take that as a compliment that he feels that comfortable — or if everybody gets that. Either version of that is awesome.
—As told to Ashley Boucher
More EW Entertainers of the Year 2023:
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.
