Legend has it that celebrities, much like our parents, grandparents, and teachers, were all children at some point in their lives. For the moment, this outrageous claim is only backed by second-hand anecdotal evidence, and so while that particular battle ultimately rages on, a new revelation has blown this discussion wide open in a myriad of ways.
Indeed, not only do these ancient texts procured by TikTok‘s @acesofgenes reveal that one Pedro Pascal—of The Last of Us, Game of Thrones, and now The Fantastic Four fame—was in fact a high school student, but he also happened to learn about mitochondria and multiplication with a certain pair of vocal chords that you may be familiar with.
A quick glance at Pascal’s yearbook (he’s called Peter here; a dissonant nuance, but somewhat appropriate considering how much he resembles Tom Holland here) reveals that the actor once tossed a graduation cap with one Dante Basco, who famously voiced the one and only Prince Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender; the conduit of one of the most lauded redemption arcs in all of pop culture.
Basco’s other notable roles include Rufio in Steven Spielberg’s Hook, the character Dolph in the queer cult classic But I’m a Cheerleader, Jai Kell from Star Wars Rebels, the villain Scorpion in Ultimate Spider-Man, and Karate Kid in the DC animated film JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time.
Basco and Pascal both graduated from the Orange County School of Arts—a charter school in Santa Ana, California that specializes in such disciplines as acting, painting, writing, and cooking—in 1993. Other notable alumni include Justice Smith (I Saw the TV Glow, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves), Between Two Ferns with Zack Galifianakis co-creator Scott Aukerman, and Vanessa Hudgens, who only ever attended the school as a seventh-grader, but counts nevertheless.
But, as previously mentioned, the real talking point here is the implications of this discovery that could never be done justice by the English language. If Pascal and Basco were both high school students at one point, then it stands to reason that the likes of Denzel Washington, Dick Van Dyke, and Harrison Ford also used to be children, and I think I speak for all of us when I say that the public is not yet developed enough to be trusted with that information.
Thankfully, we can still breathe easy in the knowledge that Paul Rudd and Morgan Freeman have always been the primordial entities we know them to be; it’s going to take much more than a yearbook or evidence of their humanity to convince us otherwise, in any case.