Pedro Pascal reveals heartwarming reason he changed his stage name

Pedro Pascal has become a household name in Hollywood, but in the early years of his career, he went by another moniker.

Years before the Chilean-American actor, whose latest roles in HBO’s hugely successful apocalyptic series The Last of Us and the Star Wars spin-off series The Mandalorian shot him to worldwide fame, he was booking small TV roles under his birth name, Pedro Balmaceda.

It was after the sudden death of his mother by suicide in 2000 – when he was 24 years old – that he decided to go by her maiden name Pascal professionally, to honour her, revealed the now 48-year-old actor in a new interview with Esquire.

“And also, because Americans had such a hard time pronouncing Balmaceda,” he said in an earlier interview with Variety. “It was exhausting.”

Elsewhere in the interview with Esquire, Pascal’s close friend, fellow actor Sarah Paulson, opened up about his difficulty in landing roles following his return to New York after his mother’s death.

“He’s talked about this publicly,” the American Horror Story star said, “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.”

It was about 14 years later, in 2014, when he secured his breakthrough role as Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones that he then found continuous success.

Pascal most recently returned as the title character on the third season of Disney Plus’s The Mandalorian.

Just last week, the show’s producer reflected on the show’s big season three, discussing the “hard” dilemma he had with Pascal’s character, whose real name is Grogu.

The Mandalorian season three airs Wednesdays on Disney Plus.