Age: 51
male
José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal (Spanish: [xoˈseˈpeðɾo βalmaˈseða pasˈkal]; born April 2, 1975) is a Chilean and American actor. After nearly two decades of taking small roles on stage and television, Pascal had his breakout role as Oberyn Martell in the fourth season of the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones (2014). He gained further prominence with his portrayal of Javier Peña in the Netflix crime series Narcos (2015–2017). He went on to appear in the films The Great Wall(2016), Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017), The Equalizer 2 (2018), and Triple Frontier (2019). Pascal's leading roles as Din Djarin in the Disney+ science fiction series The Mandalorian (2019–2023) and Joel Miller in the HBO post-apocalyptic drama series The Last of Us (2023–present) propelled him to international stardom, earning him a reputation for portraying adoptive father figures. For the latter role, he received numerous accolades, including a Screen Actors Guild Award and nominations for a Golden Globe Award and Primetime Emmy Award. He also portrayed parental characters in We Can Be Heroes (2020), Strange Way of Life (2023), and The Wild Robot (2024). Pascal has also starred in the big-budget films Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) and Gladiator II (2024). He plays Reed Richards / Mister Fantastic in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025). Active in theatre since 1999, he made his Broadway debut as Edmund in a 2019 adaptation of King Lear. In 2023, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Description above from the Wikipedia article Pedro Pascal, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.” In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.
