Sarah Paulson Gave Pedro Pascal Her Acting Pay ‘So He’d Have Money to Feed Himself’ as a Struggling Actor: ‘You Want Him to Succeed’

Sarah Paulson and Pedro Pascals friendship is three decades strong. In a new Esquire cover story on The Last of Us and The Mandalorian actor, Paulson revealed that she helped financially support Pascal in the early 2000s when he was still struggling to make it as a working actor. Paulson would sometimes give Pascal the money she made as part of her acting per diem so that he could feed himself.

The two actors first met in 1993 when Pascal came to New York City as a student in NYUs Tisch School of the Arts.

We would go to see movies all the time in those years, Paulson said, and we would get so lost in them. You can fill in the blanks about the why of that however you like, but I think there were things we wanted to escape mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

After college, Pascal moved to Los Angeles to try and make it as an actor. He landed some television work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Touched by an Angel and Undressed, but not enough for him to pay the bills. He moved back to New York City and tried again in 2000.

Hes talked about this publicly, 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, Paulson toldEsquire.

I died so many deaths, Pascal said about this period of his life. My vision of it was that if I didnt have some major exposure by the time I was 29 years old, it was over, so I was constantly readjusting what it meant to commit my life to this profession, and giving up the idea of it looking like I thought it would when I was a kid. There were so many good reasons tolet that delusion go.

Paulson rejoiced over the fact that nowadays everybody wants a piece of Pascal. Hes the lead of two huge television series, HBOs The Last of Us and Disneys The Mandalorian, and hes got a Pedro Almodvar-directed short film set to world premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival next month.

You just want him to succeed, Paulson said. And that to me, I feel like, is the sign of a major movie star. Im ready for him to take the reins from the guys from romantic comedies past, like Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson and all these guys. He can be all that. Letsremake Die Hardwith Pedro. Remake all the Lethal Weapon movies with Pedro.

Head over to Esquires website to read the Pascal cover story in its entirety.