There’s a video from an event for the Fantastic Four movie where Pedro Pascal is seen touching the arm of actress Vanessa Kirby, his co-star in the Marvel film, and how she reaches for his hand to hold it because she knew it was the best way to help him with the event anxiety he’s publicly expressed his struggles with. At the Gladiator II premiere last November, Pascal bent down to arrange his sister Lux’s dress for the red carpet; and at the recent Cannes Film Festival, while she posed, he took photos of her while telling everyone around him, “she’s my sister.” Among his most recent Instagram posts are a video against Trump’s deportations and another about the end of U.S. funding for the LGBTQ+ suicide prevention hotline.
Pascal uses his mother’s surname, he’s a migrant, exiled with his family from the Chilean dictatorship — they took asylum in Denmark before moving to the United States — brother of Lux, a trans actress and model, who turned 50 this year. It wasn’t until he was well into his 40s that he began to climb the ladder in film and television: Narcos, Game of Thrones, The Mandalorian, The Last of Us, Gladiator II, and now one of Marvel’s heroes, a film for which he’s currently on tour. In June, Materialists hit U.S. theaters, the latest film by Celine Song (the director of Past Lives), in which he plays a man in a polyamorous relationship that anyone could fall in love with.
In 2023, Time magazine ranked him among the 100 most influential people in the world. As of last year, his media presence and reach have been exponential. He is already one of the most sought-after actors in the industry, one of the most popular in Hollywood among his co-stars, and also one of those considered the most attractive. But it’s not that — or not so much the latter as all of the above — that has sparked a phenomenon in countries on every continent, among women, the LGBTQ+ community, and even some men.
So what’s going on? Nerea Aresti, a professor and doctor at the University of the Basque Country and a doctor from the State University of New York, is a specialist in gender history. She responds that while “many heterosexual women have raised their expectations of men” in recent decades, “many men will have to understand that the game has changed, above all, that there is no single way to be a man.” She asserts that “although some women remain anchored in traditional and sexist archetypes, many others seek a different model of man.”
He’s the man every heterosexual or bisexual person would like to have at their side
Carolina Meloni, philosopher
And that expectation “is individual, but it’s also collective.” Hence part of the mass furor toward Pascal, or other men like him, who “offer alternatives, sexy alternatives at that, to the model promoted by the manosphere, the incels, and, in general, all those masculinities that revolt against change and entrench themselves to defend privileges they feel are threatened.” Aresti believes it’s “important” that such men exist.
Memes circulate online stating that Pascal “is not just a man. He’s a movement.” There are posts that state “there are many sexualities, but the one thing we all have in common is that we’re attracted to Pedro,” or “I’m bisexual, which means I’m attracted to women and Pedro Pascal.” Philosopher Carolina Meloni says that “he’s the man every heterosexual or bisexual person would like to have at their side.”
Meloni laughs, but she really means it: “We love him for his political stance, for how he’s positioned himself from a privileged position as an actor in the face of the genocide in Gaza, the advance of fascism, and the cuts to the rights of the LGBTQ+ community. And we love him for the masculinity he possesses.” Because everything that’s happening around Pascal has to do with that underlying theme, and it’s not just a massive groupie craze for another good-looking actor.
Beauty? Yes, but it’s not (only) that
Valèrie May, popularizer, writer and sexual counselor, downplays the role of his physical appearance: “We have had, and still have, many Brad Pitts. Pascal awakens something else in us, everything that lies behind him, a person who doesn’t question his own masculinity. Rather it is this masculinity that has questioned the traditional one.”

Pascal “doesn’t think about whether what he does or says is more or less masculine; he shows himself to be human: vulnerable, fragile, everything that the patriarchy has always said is feminine and therefore bad. He takes that most hegemonic masculinity and turns it on its head. He turns vulnerability and tenderness into something sexy, erotic, because it is,” she adds.
According to May, what is evident in Pascal is that he is someone who supports, accompanies, and protects, not through imposition or belonging, but through care: “He relates as equals, and there is no greater space of freedom than that in which the other treats you as an equal.”
Cultural change
It goes “much further than him being the internet daddy of the moment,” says Camilo Aguilera, a psychologist, professor at the Autonomous University of Chile and mental health promoter, who recently created a post that went viral in Chile about how the desire for Pascal can also have roots in so-called daddy issues, the cultural name given to problems arising from having an absent, unloving, or authoritarian father.
And thus, he explained in the post, appears Pascal: “He takes care of Baby Yoda, protects Ellie in the midst of the apocalypse, he looks tired, but he always comes back to save you. He’s not your dad, but he’s the dad you might have needed. Why does he connect so much? Because he embodies in his characters that image of a masculinity that many people didn’t have in their fathers: warm but firm, protective but not controlling, vulnerable but still strong.”

But these potential daddy issues are still connected to everything that underlies this: how to be a man, and how feminists are pushing for that to change. And it’s not just a present-day issue. Aresti recalls that “throughout history, feminism has destabilized gender relations, challenging and transforming the prevailing models of femininity and masculinity.”
She cites the 1920s as an example, when “feminists completely rejected a Don Juan-esque model of irresponsible and abusive masculinity, demanding from men a commitment that matched the maternal mandate that women endured. If women were to be mothers, men should at least do their part. There was an intense social debate then, as there is now, in which one sector defended Don Juan-esque manliness and another recognized the need to redefine a masculinity they considered obsolete.”
“Hey, you can be however you want to be”
Just as now it is the case that women cling to that past in a different context and with “women’s expectations on a different level,” notes Aresti, the expert in the study of identities. However, “the underlying problem is the same: we are witnessing a struggle to define what masculinity is and what it means to be a man. Feminism also challenges men, who are forced to take sides.”
Young men too, who “are exposed to very diverse male role models, and it’s probably not easy for many of them to build an identity amid uncertainty. That’s why the existence of male role models like the one Pascal represents is so important.”
“The Pedro Pascal archetype, like feminism, represents the possibility of saying: ‘Hey, you can be however you want to be, maybe you don’t have to embody or fulfill any of the roles we’re offering you as a society,’” May notes.
In John Wayne Who Art in Heaven (2022), Octavio Salazar, professor of law and a member of the Committee of Experts of the EIGE (European Institute for Gender Equality), dedicates the first chapter to Don Draper, the protagonist of the television show Mad Men, who is perhaps one of the best antitheses (fictional, in this case) of Pascal, and a nemesis of feminism.

Draper, Salazar writes, “accumulates within himself the so-called pathologies of omnipotence, that is, all the negative consequences that, both physically and emotionally, many men suffer from by not wanting to fully accept their vulnerabilities, their fragility, their need for others. From constantly having to answer to others about what it means to be a real man, an authoritative father, a flawless individual.”
Pascal — or what we perceive of him — is the exact opposite. That long-held idea “of how men and women should be is falling behind,” according to Aguilera. And, he asserts, it’s not a fad; it has to do with “the fact that the old cultural family model — where one cares [for the children] and the other works — is no longer functional for our times. There’s an increasing need for emotional and domestic responsibilities to be shared equally. That’s why Pedro Pascal connects so much; he represents a type of man that wasn’t previously seen: protective, emotional, imperfect, but committed.”
The middle ground
For Salazar, there’s a nuance to all this. He believes part of Pascal’s appeal lies in his position somewhere in between: “If we look at his physical appearance, he retains a measure of traditional virility that can be attractive to both women and men, and at the same time, he doesn’t shy away from appearing on a red carpet with elements more typical of what we understand as femininity, or he gives off signals — not particularly emphatic or revolutionary, I think, but kind and seductive enough — for those involved in other aspects of social transformation.”

He believes that Pascal “moves in that almost perfect balance that allows him to reach different generations of women and also women on a very different social spectrum, and in their commitment to equality.” This analysis makes the professor wonder “whether Pascal is aware of how he’s constructing this character, and how that construction is paying off in the film and image industry where one of the keys lies in how you sell yourself to viewers.”
Something that, notes Meloni, the philosopher and academic, “couldn’t possibly be happening to an actress.” ”Pedro Pascal and I were born on the same day, April 2, 1975. As a woman who has just entered her 50s, and is in the process of menopause, I am experiencing all the symbolic, digital, and social violence against the body of a mature woman on the way to old age. If you let your hair go gray, forget it. His age is not questioned.”
Pascal himself has acknowledged this issue. In an interview, speaking about the frenzy he’s sparked, he asked the journalist: “What’s wrong with people who like an old guy like me? I don’t understand. What’s happened culturally? How can all this happen? They should focus on Harry Styles.” When you’re a cis-heterosexual man, Meloni affirms, “your 50s are the prime of your life.”
She thinks of actresses, Cate Blanchett (56), Penélope Cruz (51), and “how they’ve had to go through a process of operations, or dyes, or diets or whatever to hide their age or to appear younger. Not him, we love him with his wrinkles, with his gray hair, with his age.”
Half the world loves him. Pedro Pascal: The many reasons we’re deeply, madly, unapologetically in love with the star is one of the many headlines dedicated to the actor, this one from Elle magazine in India.
They all agree that this love for a man who doesn’t conform to the old notion of how men should be, and who contrasts with the new men angry because women have gone too far, is political. That the desire for vulnerability and tenderness, for care, is political: it reflects a need for change in the unequal social structures that have historically subjugated half the population: women. And all those people who don’t fit into the boundaries the patriarchy says they should.
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