Cannes 2025: Why The Last of Us star Pedro Pascal is blowing up your social feeds

A film festival as glitzy as Cannes always attracts big stars. But for all the Nicole Kidmans, Tom Cruises, Angelina Jolies and Scarlett Johanssons, which attendee has been blowing up everyone’s social feeds this past weekend?

Pedro Pascal.

Women and men want him and women and men want to be him. Pascal is everyone’s favourite actor, a generational-spanning celebrity whose irrepressible charisma makes him undeniable.

He’s a cultural force, recognised for his thespian talents (the man can act) as well as his public persona, whether he’s the supportive big brother to his sister Lux, a transgender woman, and decrying JK Rowling for her anti-trans stance, or playfully cheek-kissing Alexander Skarsgard during a Cannes premiere for the Swedish actor’s new film.

For his own premiere, Ari Aster’s political satire Eddington, Pascal wore a waist-clinching Dior suit and he took his sister Lux as his plus-one. But it was his appearance at a photo call and press conference the next day that really captured everyone’s attention.

Wearing an all-black Calvin Klein ensemble, his sleeveless tank was cut low on both sides, giving a tantalising peek at Pascal’s overall physique. His biceps on show was a phwoar moment for the internet, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as showstopping if it wasn’t part of the bigger package.

Part of that is his willingness to be political at a time when several actors have clamped up, maybe humbled by their lack of influence in the 2024 US presidential elections or maybe because every Hollywood studio is treading lightly in the face of the Trump administration’s legal tussles against their parent companies and subsidiaries.

Yes, your old-school celebrities such as Jane Fonda and Robert De Niro, the ones who have always been bolshie, will never stay quiet. Pascal though, he speaks eloquently and compassionately from a place of lived experience.

When he addresses trans rights – calling out Rowling for “heinous loser behaviour” after the writer threw her financial support behind an anti-trans legal campaign, wearing a pro-trans “Protect the Dolls” t-shirt to the premiere of Marvel movie Thunderbolts – he has a personal connection to the cause.

Not that it should be necessary to have that family link, but it’s hard to point at Pascal and accuse him of “virtue signalling”.

At the Eddington press conference, he was asked about the US Government’s crackdown on immigration, and he pointed to his own history. “Obviously, it’s very scary for an actor participating in a movie to sort of speak to issues like this. It’s far too intimidating the question for me to really address, I’m not informed enough,” he said.

“I want people to be safe and to be protected, and I want very much to live on the right (side of) history. I’m an immigrant. My parents are refugees from Chile. We fled a dictatorship and I was privileged enough to grow up in the US after asylum in Denmark.

“If it weren’t for that, I don’t know what would have happened to us. I stand by those protections.”

The entire Eddington panel was asked about artistic expression and whether they feared governmental retaliation as a result of their participation in subversive art, and most of them, including Emma Stone, Joaquin Phoenix and Austin Butler, sat in awkward silence, hoping someone else will jump in and take the question.

Pascal started to speak. “Fear is the way they win. So, keep telling the stories. Keep expressing yourself and keep fighting to be who you are,” he said.

“F..k the people that try to make you scared, and fight back. This is the perfect way to do so, in telling stories, and don’t them let win.”

That Pascal can balance his forthrightness with his mainstream appeal puts him in a rare position. Few celebrities can put their head above the parapet but Pascal has cultivated a reputation as someone accessible, that you just want to be friends with.

Or, something more. He hasn’t publicly addressed his sexuality but there is a fluidity to his expression, through fashion, through advocacy, that Pascal could be to someone, whoever they want him to be.

He has also chosen his projects well, so that the most masculine, hetero-normative of men like and can relate to Pascal because he’s in some of their favourite titles – in the Star Wars universe as The Mandalorian, as a crime fighter in Narcos, a sword-wielding general in Gladiator II, as Joel Miller in The Last of Us, and Reed Richards in the upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe reboot of The Fantastic Four.

Pascal plays characters who are active. They have rich inner lives too – especially Joel and Mando - but his onscreen presence is constantly on the move, doing things. That plays into his off-screen charm, given the public can rarely ever dissociate the real person from their characters, that’s how para-social relationships work.

It also helps that at 50, Pascal is someone who embodies the later-in-life success story. His break-out role was as Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones, debuting in an episode that was broadcast within a week of his 39th birthday.

Oberyn’s confidence and swagger, his viper-like moves and the grisly and shocking manner of his death, meant that despite appearing in only six episodes in the fourth season, he remains one of the series’ most memorable characters of the series.

It made an instant star of Pascal, even though he had been kicking around in the New York theatre scene and in Hollywood since 1999, popping up in guest and recurring roles on network TV including in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Good Wife, Brothers & Sisters, NYPD Blue and Homeland where he played cops, lawyers and a college student whose security blanket was a copy of William Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.

The current moment suits Pascal. He is not so easily boxed in but has wide appeal, and his wisened face gives him a more distinct look than when he was a twenty-something pretty boy.

But the real it factor, as it always is, is just that he is damn charismatic and damn talented.