Sarah Paulson and Pedro Pascal’s Beautiful Friendship: a Timeline

Several stars turned out to see the new West End production of Evita, starring Rachel Zegler as Eva Perón, in its first official performance on Tuesday—including Keanu Reeves, Pedro Pascal and Sarah Paulson. The latter two came together, making affectionate gestures while posing on the red carpet. It’s a natural state for Pascal and Paulson to be in: their great friendship was forged more than 30 years ago, before either one became a household name.

Sarah Paulson y Pedro Pascal en el photocall de Evita en Londres este pasado martesMaja Smiejkowska – PA Images/Getty Images

Paulson and Pascal, both 50, met when they were still teenagers in New York in the early 1990s. Pascal had moved east from California to study at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and Paulson had lived in the city since she was a child. The first friend he made at NYU had gone to school with Paulson. Soon, as Pascal noted during a joint Interview magazine interview last year, he became a member of Paulson’s inner circle.

The friends adopted the habit of going to the movies as a group. After a screening of the Jeff Bridges film Fearless, Pascal and Paulson remembered in another Interview story published in 2014, they went to the park and happened to see Woody Harrelson.

“We were the two people who knew exactly who he was and fanned out a little bit,” said Pascal. “Nobody else cared. We had our little celebrity sighting moment and that, in retrospect, was our first step towards bonding. Which cut to, I’m pretty sure that night, drinking 40s, me being on Romi’s shoulders running down Fifth Avenue, and getting knocked down by a cabbie.

Sarah Paulson y Pedro Pascal en Nueva York en 2005.Brad Barket/Getty Images

“No one was more fun,” than Pascal, Paulson recently told Vanity Fair. “But he was also…sad. There’s a well of pain that lives right behind his eyes that he’s never tried to hide from, and I think it’s what makes him so translucent as an actor. It was just magnetic for me as a young person and still is today.”

Paulson’s career began to take off well before Pascal’s did. In 1994, a year after they met, she already made her Broadway debut and appeared in an episode of Law and Order. In 1995 she shared the bill with Kathleen Turner in a made-for-TV movie, and in 1997 she made her big-screen debut with the independent thriller Levitation. In 2011, she teamed up with Ryan Murphy for American Horror Story, launching into a new level of success. “However hard those years may have been to an outsider who knows you, it was like watching a rocket,” Pascal told Interview in 2024. “It was like, ‘She’s making it happen.’”

Sarah Paulson y Pedro Pascal en los SAG Awards de 2016Gregg DeGuire

For Pascal, then known as Pedro Balmaceda—he adopted his mother’s surname after she passed away when he was 24—the trajectory was slower. His most prominent credit before the turn of the century was a one-episode character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Pascal also lost touch with Paulson for a few years after she moved to Los Angeles to pursue her budding acting career. But it didn’t take long for them to reconnect when he followed in her footsteps.

“I came to L.A. for a bit and then went back to New York,” Pascal explained in the 2014 Interview story. “Even after going back to New York, we somehow went into chapter two of our friendship that—we attached to each other and haven’t been able to let go.”

Still, Pascal’s career failed to launch. He barely made a living, alternating between small plays, waiting tables, and sporadic roles in series like Law and Order and Without a Trace.

Sarah Paulson y Pedro Pascal en los SAG Awards de 2014.Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

“He’s 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 said in an Esquire story published in 2023.

Later, Paulson did more than just give him money. In 2013 she called her friend, fellow actress Amanda Peet, to see if she could pass along Pascal’s Game of Thrones audition tape. Peet in turn passed it to her husband, David Benioff, one of the series’s showrunners. The rest is history: after playing Oberyn Martell, Narcos came along. Since then, Pascal has been working non-stop for more than ten years, progressively climbing the ladder to the top of Hollywood.

As he says in the Vanity Fair, Pascal experienced a sort of epiphany on February 4, 2023—the 23rd anniversary of his mother’s death, when he somehow became aware of how much he had achieved since his rough beginnings. It happened just after Pascal hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time, to much acclaim—and Paulson, who flew to New York to take part in a sketch, then stayed with him to party all night.

Sarah Paulson y Pedro Pascal en Hollywood en 2015Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images

“It was just a night we didn’t want to end,” she said. “If there had been a camera on me when it was happening—and there’d been a slow push in—it would’ve shown me watching his life begin. Because he was so, so present, and having this wild time. And he had no idea that it was going so well, and with the timing of his mother and this moment in his career, it was like a rebirth.”

In their public appearances, it is common to see Pedro Pascal and Sarah Paulson holding hands or holding each other’s waists. But there is no romantic or sexual connotation to these gestures. (Paulson has been in a relationship with fellow actor Holland Taylor for the past ten years; Pascal has always been tight-lipped about his own romantic life.) As he has mentioned on a few occasions, Pascal sometimes resorts to physical contact to deal with anxiety, especially when he is in front of a lot of people. Sometimes he also puts his own hand on his stomach, “because that’s where my anxiety resides”—as he explained to Bella Ramsey during a photo call for The Last of Us in 2023.

Original story in VF Spain.