It took a long time for Pedro Pascal to get to where he is today as one of the most popular and in-demand talents in Hollywood, with the actor spending the first fifteen years of his career bouncing around the worlds of film and television before finally securing the one-two punch of Game of Thrones and Narcos, which put him firmly in the ascendancy.
In between those two points, Pascal appeared in a huge number of massively popular shows, mostly for a one-episode guest spot. That list includes Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Law & Order, The Good Wife, Without a Trace, CSI, Homeland, The Mentalist and many more, while he even played Ed Indelicato in the 2011 Wonder Woman pilot that was never picked up, almost a decade before he suited up as Maxwell Lord for Patty Jenkins’ blockbuster sequel.
One hit series that he auditioned for but didn’t land was The Vampire Diaries, with executive producer Julie Plec revealing in a recent interview that Pascal went in for the role of Marcel Gerard. Charles Michael Davis ended up nabbing the part, before going on to play a major role in all five seasons of spinoff The Originals.
“One of the other people who read opposite Charles for that part was Pedro Pascal, who I loved. I was obsessed with him. But he was just too on the older side, right? So whilst everyone else was like, ‘Oh my god, Charles Michael Davis’, like blown away and so excited, and I of course loved him and am so happy we cast him, but I was in full Pedro Pascal fangirl mode and was just like, ‘Oh my god, he’s so great’. But Charles, like, I mean ‘I am the king’, right? He just had that swagger.”
Pascal is a full ten years older than Davis, which is likely one of the reasons he didn’t end up securing Marcel despite Plec’s obvious enthusiasm. It worked out pretty well for The Mandalorian star in the end, though, and he’s booked for a raft of exciting upcoming projects including Season 3 of the Star Wars Disney Plus series, HBO’s video game adaptation The Last of Us, self-aware Nicolas Cage action comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and Judd Apatow’s Netflix comedy The Bubble.