Los Angeles, May 18 (UNI) Hollywood actor Pedro Pascal urged actors and filmmakers to stand up to political aggression, while promoting his film ‘Eddington’ in the Cannes Film Festival, telling them to "fight back".
Coming in the aftermath of US President Donald Trump’s scathing attack on rock legend Bruce Springsteen, and his bizarre claim about country-pop diva Taylor Swift’s decline in popularity because of his dislike of her music, ‘The Last Of Us’ actor said “F*** the people that try to make you scared,” reported The Guardian.
“And fight back,” he added. “This is the perfect way to do so in telling stories. Don’t let them win,” said the 50-year-old ‘Game Of Thrones’, and ‘The Mandalorian’ star.
He urged creatives to “keep telling the stories, keep expressing yourself and keep fighting for it”, while answering questions about an alleged political climate of fear in the country.
“Obviously, it’s very scary for an actor participating in a movie to sort of speak on issues like this,” Pascal said when asked whether he feared that the US could completely close down all forms of migration, due to tensions over Trump’s immigration policies. “I want people to be safe and to be protected, and I want very much to live on the right (side) of history.”
“I’m an immigrant,” said Pascal, whose parents fled Pinochet-led Chile when he was nine months old. “We fled a dictatorship, and I was privileged enough to grow up in the US, after asylum in Denmark, and if it weren’t for that, I don’t know what would have happened to us. And so, I stand by those needing protection, always.”
Set in the first summer of Covid-19 restrictions and Black Lives Matter protests, ‘Eddington’ is directed by Ari Aster, and stars Pascal alongside Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone and Austin Butler.
A political satire, Pascal plays a small-town mayor in New Mexico during the beginning of the pandemic who is pro-pandemic measures and mask policies, while Phoenix plays a sheriff who is baffled by mask policies and the apparent hysteria among the townspeople, being cynical of the protective measures.
“I wrote this film in a state of fear and anxiety about the world,” Aster said in Cannes. “I feel like over the last 20 years we’ve fallen into this age of hyper individualism.
“The social force that used to be central in liberal mass democracies, which is an agreed-upon version of the world, that is gone now. And Covid felt like the moment where that link was finally cut for good.”
Pascal, who has been doing a bunch of high-profile roles in recent years is now set to step into the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Professor Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, in the upcoming ‘Fantastic Four’ film.
UNI ANV RN