Pedro Pascal on the Hardest Thing He’s Had to Learn to Do and His First Leading Film Role in Behemoth!

“My son has always accused me of writing competency porn,” says Behemoth! filmmaker Tony Gilroy. “I really like a hero that’s really good at something.” The film’s main character, Alex, is just that: a prodigal cellist who returns to Los Angeles and gets into the world of Hollywood film scoring after decades performing symphonic work around the country. But when Oscar Isaac departed the drama last August, Gilroy knew he’d have to either scrap his first directorial feature since 2012’s The Bourne Legacy or recast his lead. Enter Pedro Pascal.

“I remember reading [the script] and being like, Fuck, I want this,” Pascal tells Vanity Fair. Coming off a hot streak of big-screen hits including Gladiator II, Materialists, and Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, the actor was eager for a break. Before his first meeting with Gilroy, Pascal secretly hoped he and the filmmaker would be out of tune: “Maybe he’ll be a jerk. Maybe he won’t like me. Maybe there’s an exit somehow.”

Gilroy had his own reservations about Pascal: “I thought he was going to be somehow superficial or flighty,” the Oscar-nominated writer-director admits in a separate interview. But the nomadic lifestyle of an artist like Alex was deeply familiar to Pascal, who shot to stardom with HBO’s The Last of Us. “There was something overall about this story that I think I connected to more cerebrally and emotionally,” Pascal says. “[Alex is] not a rock star. He’s not even somebody that’s looking for the spotlight. He’s just someone whose first language is music…. It’s a love letter to music; it’s a love letter to movies. It’s about family; it’s about legacy; it’s about healing. I wished for myself this kind of experience as an actor before I ever got to act,” adds the actor, now 51. “And now it’s coming very much later in my life and later in my career…. There was an instant kismet.”

Over the course of their three-hour meeting, Pascal’s passion convinced Gilroy he could bring the character to life. “He’s just…really, really smart about how to be a movie star…and—more than anything—absolutely willing and eager to enter into a completely honest, no-holds-barred conversation,” Gilroy says. “There’s so much artifice and…monkey business that goes on—to find actors that you can talk to directly, honestly, from the start…you can make them a coconspirator from the very beginning.”

For Pascal, that meant musical training, spending each day after filming getting attuned to the instrument his character had known all his life. “Holding a bow correctly alone takes a day’s lesson, and that’s moving fast,” he tells VF. Although Pascal’s previous work on projects like Game of Thrones and Gladiator II required him to learn to do stunts and handle swords, this “was 10 times harder than any of those things because of the fucking cello,” Pascal says with a kind of disgruntled fondness. “Literally the hardest, hardest, hardest thing I’ve ever had to learn to do. Being in a gladiator arena or hanging from a harness—that stuff pales in comparison to learning how to play the cello and making it look convincing as you’re doing Tchaikovsky.”

Pascal relied on some childhood piano lessons, plus his knowledge as “a huge movie nerd” whose love of the soundtracks for Footloose and Flashdance evolved into a fandom for renowned film composers like John Williams and Thomas Newman. “I even started to see movies depending on who was scoring it,” says the actor.

A love of music also applies to Gilroy, who until his mid-20s “wanted to be a rock-and-roller and have a big record deal,” he recalls. “And I found out along the way the kind of musician that I wasn’t, which is the kind of musicians who are in this film, sort of elite.” While writing the script for Behemoth!—the title of a fictional film on which Pascal’s character works—Gilroy spent a year interviewing actual studio musicians, like famed harpist Gayle Levant, whose hundreds of screen credits include Rogue One (2016) and Duplicity (2009). Gilroy’s Star Wars projects inspired his foray into movie music. While working with composer Nicholas Britell on Andor and Michael Giacchino on Rogue One, Gilroy was struck by the orchestral landscape that surrounded them. “You might have 30, 60, 90 players in a room, and they could hardly be more diverse. If you look at them on the street without their instruments, they have nothing in common,” he says. “The moment they enter the music and start to play, all that individuality…disappears. The whole job is to become a single, collective, communal, blended voice. It’s a really fascinating transformation…. I can’t believe no one’s made a movie about this before.”

Music helps to communicate the passage of time onscreen. Alex’s return trip to Los Angeles unfurls chronologically, but each time he plays the opening cue on a different fictional project—some scored at the Sony stage used for recording the music to classics like Singin’ in the Rain and Lawrence of Arabia—a flashback is triggered that tells you why Alex left LA, as well as what prompted his homecoming. “I knew that since every piece of music had a different function in the movie and a different voice,” Gilroy says, “it would be such a mistake to hire a single composer.”

Instead, the filmmaker enlisted an unprecedented nine different composers to score separate orchestrations for the fake movies of Behemoth! Given the unique nature of spreading credit among that many artists, Gilroy had to pull some strings—bypassing people’s agents to meet one-on-one. “I had to create a fear of missing out,” he says. “It was difficult in the beginning. By the end, I had to turn people away.” The film’s final roster of composers includes: Michael Abels, Emily Bear, Lukas Frank, Michael Giacchino, James Newton Howard, Henry Jackman, Nami Melumad, Brandon Roberts, and Alan Silvestri.

For all of Gilroy’s innovation in bringing this group together, it’s unlikely that the film’s music will be eligible for Oscar recognition. (Current Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rules dictate that up to three composers can be credited to receive individual trophies.) “The reticence about nine composers from [a studio music executive] and the powers that be is, ‘You can never be nominated for an Academy Award if you have nine composers, and you’re doing a movie all about movie music,’” Gilroy says. “I don’t think that’s been completely adjudicated yet. It probably will fall that way.”

The writer-director has bigger ambitions for Behemoth! anyway—like reinvigorating an industry that Gilroy says is “under siege.” After all, the harsh economic realities of being a working musician are part of the reason so many talented Los Angeles–based artists were at Gilroy’s fingertips. Because musicians are paid with residuals and royalties instead of buyouts, “so much scoring has moved overseas,” he explains. “So this [movie] is a coral reef. This is an endangered thing.” Not that the film itself is all gloom and doom. “I mean, it’s Behemoth with an exclamation point,” Gilroy adds. “There’s pixie dust on this movie. There’s whimsy, there’s farce in it.”

That’s thanks, in part, to the supporting characters who surround Pascal’s Alex, including his fellow-musician father (played by Hank Azaria) and brother (Will Arnett, who replaced David Harbour mid-production). Sorry, Baby’s Eva Victor plays Nadia, a cellist whom Alex romances while on a job in Dallas, while Olivia Wilde is Carol, Alex’s leopard-print-wearing ex with an axe to grind. “When Olivia walked in, we were like, Why didn’t we start with Olivia before we had Pedro? Holy shit. She’s just amazing,” Gilroy says. “She’s not an actor anymore. She’s a filmmaker.”

But make no mistake—this is Pascal’s movie; he appears in every scene, showing 25 years of our hero’s journey, a first for the actor. “Fantastic Four is exactly that; it’s in the title—there are four of us. Bella [Ramsey] and I were partners on The Last of Us. Baby Grogu steals the show [on The Mandalorian], and there are three to five of us under the suit of the character Din Djarin,” Pascal recounts. “This was like stepping into the thing that I always wanted—a character where to draw from your own experiences is the only source that you have.” Says Gilroy, “This is closer to him than anybody’s ever seen.”

The whole endeavor, stripped of the movie mechanics Pascal had become comfortable with in recent years, made the actor feel vulnerable. “Once I started to feel like I had the cello under control, I completely panicked about how I would play the character,” he remembers. “How much of myself do I just bring to this, and how much do I just show up as me? And do I even know how to do that? Does it have to be a different world? Do I have to be on a different planet? Do I have to have special powers? Do there have to be infected monsters? This is just so naked. Am I out of practice?”

To Gilroy’s eyes, it was a seamless transition. “Pedro Pascal, he’s taking center stage for the first time in his whole career. It’s his adventure. It’s his moment,” he says. “It’s really time for the audience to see how right they were to invest in him as a movie star.”

Behemoth! holds a special place in the actor’s heart due to what he learned about himself while making it. “I chose early to have a clear separation from [my] work and life,” he says. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that the line between work and life is less and less visible. In pragmatic ways, the energy of work needs to stay where it is, on set or onstage, and you’ve got to go home and you’ve got to chill out.” When filming ended, “I had a stronger perspective on my own personal circumstances and my own understanding of confronting loss. I’m always talking positively about every work experience that I’ve ever had,” Pascal admits, “but this was something different. This was a personal and intimate and creatively bursting environment…and I miss it a lot.”

For Gilroy, making the movie that brought him and Pascal together—despite their preconceived notions—struck a similarly emotional chord. “It sounds so trite, but I never made a movie about anything I loved before,” he says. “And I was already deep into making it before I realized that that was true.”