Pedro Pascal has admitted that forgot he got the starring role of Joel in HBO’s The Last of Us series because she took a zolpidem (insomnia pill) just before she got the news about the casting.
Appearing on The Tonight Show, Pascal revealed that he had a momentary memory lapse when he was offered the role for The Last of Us. This is because he took a pill to fall asleep right after taking part in a late-night call-in about the adrenaline-pumping series.
“It was a very strange moment. I was actually in London and everyone else was in LA,” Pascal told host Jimmy Fallon. “They sent me the scripts and they said, ‘Craig Mazin wants you to read these scripts. If you like them, he would like to talk to you.’
Pascal explained that I was a fan of the HBO miniseries called Chernobyl (which Mazin wrote and executive produced), so he read the first script for The Last of Us and found that it fueled his desire to meet Mazin and talk more about his new series.
“We talked and we fell in love,” he explained. “And they said, ‘Would you like to stay up a little later to talk to Neil Druckmann, the creator of the video game?'”
“I stayed up for that zoom,” he continued. “At that time, it was very late. I had to get up in the morning, so I I took a sleeping pill just in case; My adrenaline and hopes had risen. But they called me and told me that I got the job right after I took the zolpidem.”
The actor said he was “excited” but also that He “didn’t remember” being offered the roleso he got up the next morning ready to “wait by the phone all day”, until he saw some congratulatory messages. “I looked at my phone and thought, ‘Oh yeah! I’ve got the job.'”.
Pascal plays Joel, a man who has suffered an incalculable loss at the beginning of the fungal apocalypse. He is tasked with escaping his tyrannical Quarantine Zone to smuggle a young woman, Ellie, across the United States to a medical facility run by a rogue militia called the Fireflies.
“A very traumatic event makes this man what he is 20 years later. This is, you know, a dystopian world with fascist governments and a very contagious cordyceps that turns you into an infected monster. These are good times,” Pascal joked.
The Last of Us series premiered its first episode at dawn on January 16, and broke records on HBO with more than 4.7 million viewers. The video game adaptation was the second best HBO premiere in the last decade, only surpassed by The House of the Dragon.
If you want to know more about this successful adaptation, find out why Nick Offerman (Bill in the series) Haven’t played the series yet and how the third episode of the series demonstrates that changes are critical for good adaptation.