Pedro Pascal (born 2 April, 1975; full name Jose Pedro Balmaceda Pascal) is a Chilean-American actor. Pedro joined the cast in the Season 4 playing Oberyn Martell aka the Red Viper.[1]
Background
His parents escaped the Chilean military dictatorship and he was raised in Texas and California. He attended Orange County School of the Arts and then New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.[2][3]
He has a prolific stage career on Broadway[4] and previously acted on several American TV series including recurring roles on The Good Wife and Graceland.[5]
Game of Thrones
After being cast as Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones Season 4, Pascal did not have enough time to read all of the very long novels. Pascal still wanted to devote effort to researching his character, however, and Oberyn only appears in the second half of the third novel, A Storm of Swords (adapted as "Season 4"). Therefore, Pascal skipped ahead and read all of the chapters in A Storm of Swords that Oberyn directly appears in - starting with Chapter 38 ("Tyrion V"), which is primarily focused on Oberyn's introduction when he arrives in King's Landing (corresponding to the Season 4 premiere, though some of the dialogue was moved around between episodes). Almost all of the chapters that Oberyn appears in were told from Tyrion's POV.[6]
The first scene that Pedro Pascal filmed for the TV series was the scene from the end of "Mockingbird" in which Oberyn visits Tyrion in his prison cell.[7]
Pascal is actually allergic to cats - and his character Oberyn loathes the Lannister family, whose sigil is coincidentally a big cat (a golden lion).[8]
Pascal really likes berries. The production team decorated his table at the Purple Wedding with berries, and the room in the brothel had a bowl of nuts and berries. Therefore he was not simply miming the act of eating the prop food (such as when he eyes Loras during the feast) and was munching on them when the cameras were not rolling. This led to some minor complications, because staffers had to keep refilling the bowls to make sure the scenes were internally consistent (if Oberyn only ate one berry in the story, but they refilmed the scene multiple times, the bowl would end up nearly empty by the later takes because he was actually eating them each time).[9]
For his fight training for Oberyn's duel with Ser Gregor Clegane, Pascal said:
- "The production of Game of Thrones actually put me in some pre-training before I went to Europe to start shooting. I was put into some classes with a master of Wushu, an acrobatic martial art, and they put me with a master, his name is Master Hu, and he has a studio in Los Angeles where he sort of basically showed me the basics and taught me how to fight with a spear and twist my body around and move in ways I never thought possible. And this was a guy who actually did Shaolin movies with Jet Li very early in Jet Li's career, and fought alongside him as his sidekick, so he was the real deal.
Then once I got to Europe and started shooting, there were really intensive fight rehearsals with me and the stunt team that was headed by C.C. Smiff, and other actors, and we did a lot of fight choreography and rehearsals. The Oberyn style of fighting is inspired by Wushu."[10]
Credits
Guest-starring
Template:Season four credits
See also
Pedro Pascal on Wikipedia
Pedro Pascal on IMDb
Pedro Pascal on X- Pedro Pascal's Blogger page
- Interview with Pedro Pascal at Galo
- Interview with Pascal in The New York Times