Pedro Pascal says he tried to get himself into Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show by asking for what amounted to a volunteer job, even offering to serve coffee if needed. When no answer came right away, he sent an email with a selfie of himself sticking out his tongue. Bad Bunny’s team called back within 25 minutes.
Pascal said he had put the feelers out through people he works with because he wanted to take part “in any way” in the performance, which he said represented celebration and was better than anyone else at the moment at synchronized representation. The response turned out to be simple and direct: “We want you to come to the show.”
On the day of the performance, Pascal said he was told to wear beige. He was then pulled from his seat in the stands, taken backstage and shown a scene that included Cardi B, Young Miko, Karol G and Jessica Alba. Then came the line that made the moment land: “OK, so the vibe is: you’re dancing.”
Pascal said he did not realize until right before the performance that he was going to be in the Casita, and that was why he looked like “a deer in headlights.” The appearance folded him into one of the most watched pop spectacles of the year and put a face to a guest spot that was as much surprise as pageantry. The source frames the appearance as part of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime show.
The interview also found Pascal looking back at how late fame arrived in his life. He said he was 38 when he got the part of Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones, after years of holding waitering and bartending jobs in New York City, scraping by and getting bailed out many times by his sister and friends. He said the work was often paycheck to paycheck, though theatre jobs became somewhat consistent for a few years.
Pascal, who turned 51 on April 2, also talked about the way age shapes what he can and cannot do with a role. He said there are “two ways of looking at it” and that, as old as he feels and as silly as some of it can be, he is grateful to have been a fully developed character before experiencing large-scale exposure. He also said he has never been able to grow a proper beard, that Oberyn required specific facial-hair grooming, and that Narcos felt like the point when a moustache made sense. “But if the role calls for it, it can all disappear,” he said.
For Pascal, the halftime cameo was not a polished strategic move so much as a small public reminder of how far he has come. A man who once worked tables in New York and said he was scraping by wound up backstage at the Super Bowl, in beige, because he sent one more email and made it funny enough to get a reply.
