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This is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
Today we continue our series highlighting some of our favorite interviews of the year.
Ben Stiller discusses his documentary about his parents, the comedy duo Stiller and Mira.
When they'd leave town for work.
Ben sometimes went rogue, going to places like Studio 54 with his older sister when he was just 13.
They put me in a yellow and green polka-dotted Fiorucci shirt.
Fiorucci was the store at the time that was like the cool fashion store.
And an army jacket and these Mickey Mouse sunglasses.
Also, we hear from Pedro Pascal.
He's been a Marvel superhero, a grieving smuggler in The Last of Us and a bounty hunter in The Mandalorian.
Last summer, he starred in both the fantastic four First Steps and Materialists.
That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
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This is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
Here's Terry with our first interview.
My guest, Ben Stiller, has made a very personal documentary about his parents and what it was like to be their son.
Ben's father, Jerry Stiller, co-starred on Seinfeld playing Frank Costanza, George's father.
Ben's mother, Ann Mira, was an actress.
Together, Ben's parents were known as the comedy duo Stiller and Mara.
They were so popular in the 60s and 70s, they were on The Ed Sullivan Show more than 30 times.
Sometimes, Ben went with them to their appearances on TV talk shows and in nightclubs.
In 2020, five years after Mira's death, Jerry Stiller died.
While Ben was going through his father's possessions, he was stunned to discover, stashed away, many cassette and reel-to-reel audio recordings Jerry Stiller had made.
They documented his life and his relationship with Anne, including recordings of conversations with Anne in which they had disagreements about their marriage and their act.
Some of those conversations are included in the documentary, along with video clips of their sketches from their TV appearances.
The documentary Stiller and Mara, Nothing is Lost, is streaming on Apple TV.
Ben Stiller has been famous for years as an actor starring in such films as Zoolander, Meet the Parents, Night at the Museum and their sequels, as well as Dodgeball, Tropic Thunder and The Royal Tenenbaums.
In the last few years, he's been doing more and more directing and producing.
Now he's the executive producer and primary director of the popular, Emmy award-winning Apple TV series Severance.
Let's start with a clip from the new documentary, Stiller and Mira, Nothing is Lost.
This is an excerpt of one of the audio recordings of Ben's parents rehearsing a sketch about how the couple they're portraying hate each other, not realizing that Ben's sister, who was then a child, is overhearing them, thinking the argument is real.
At the end of this recording, we'll hear Ben and his sister Amy looking back at that time.
We have a sketch which we call Hate.
You know, I say to Anne, I hate you.
She says, you hate me, I hate you.
And one day Amy, who's six, came into the room and she heard us saying this to each other, and we looked at her for a moment and we didn't know what to say.
So we said Amy Mommy Daddy, rehearse.
Mommy, Daddy, rehearse.
And Amy looked at us and she started to smile.
Well, about two weeks later, we were fighting.
And Amy walked in and she said, Mommy and Daddy rehearsed?
No, Mommy and Daddy fight.
Get out of here.
It gets to be a little complicated sometimes.
I hated you before I met you.
I hated you before you were born.
To me that's like one of the things that I think about is just how that became sort of like yeah, that's the laugh, that's the funny joke.
But what is the reality of that story, though?
We don't know, Ben.
That's why we're so messed up.
That's why we're doing this documentary.
That's why we're going to figure it out.
So those last two voices were Ben Stiller and his sister Amy.
Ben Stiller, welcome back to Fresh Air.
This is a really probing, emotionally deep movie.
I really, really liked it.
So the clip that we open with is your sister not being able to tell sometimes what was a real fight and what was a rehearsal for a sketch.
Did you experience anything like that?
Yeah.
Nice to be with you, Terry.
Yeah.
In this apartment that we lived in, they had a living room.
We called it the big living room.
It wasn't that big but that they would use as their office when we were younger and then I think, like when I was like 13 or 14, they got an office on 57th Street.
But most of the time they'd been in this office in the apartment working.
So we would just hear them, you know, doing their thing in there.
And sometimes their voices would be raised.
Yeah, sometimes there were arguments that happened.
And it was kind of just like part of our lives.
It was like, yeah, mom and dad are doing their thing in there.
And as a kid, I don't think you question these things.
It's just like what your parents do.
So a lot of people know your father, Jerry Stiller from Seinfeld playing George's father, Frank Costanza.
But they don't necessarily know Stiller and Mira routines.
So I want to play one of their better-known ones that I think is really funny.
And this goes back to the really early days of computer dating.
And I think at this point, you didn't have your own computer.
This is the period where you'd send in your information and they'd put it through a computer at the company and then send you back a match.
Is that, am I right in thinking that?
I think so.
I don't know how it worked, but it definitely was pre-personal computers.
This was in the 60s.
But I think the idea of a computer being able to match people up, that was the new thing that was happening.
So this borrows from your parents' actual marriage, because your father is Jewish.
Your mother was Irish and Catholic, although she later converted to Judaism.
So in this sketch, the computer dating service has set them up together.
And your father's name in the sketch is Hershey Horowitz and your mother's name in the sketch is Mary Elizabeth Doyle.
Where you from?
Me?
I'm from Flatbush.
Oh, really?
That's where I'm from.
You're kidding.
East 42nd Street.
I live on East 42nd Street.
Oh, that's amazing.
That's my blog.
Really?
Hey, this computer really works.
Yeah.
Hey, you know Richie Flanagan?
Richie Flanagan?
Yeah, tall, skinny kid.
No.
Do you know Morris Goldstein?
Goldstein?
No, I don't know him.
You know Mary Ellen Moriarty?
Mary Ellen Moriarty?
No.
Do you know Moish Bader?
Moish?
No, Moish Bader.
Moish?
No, no.
I would remember.
You know Elliot Blumenfeld?
No, I don't know him.
You know Danny McQueenie?
No.
Timothy Sheehy?
No.
Tommy Toohey?
No.
Stanley Auster?
No, I don't know him.
Adolph Hausman?
No.
Xavier Duffy?
No.
Mike Schoenfeld?
Grace Mary McGinnity?
Raymond Kish?
Kathleen Hall?
No.
Sis Hall?
No.
Junior Hall?
No.
Mike Hall?
No.
Marguerite Hall?
No.
Raymond Hall?
No.
You don't know the Halls?
No.
You know Seymour Aaron Price?
No, I don't know him.
You know the Lepsin brothers?
No, I don't know them.
Artie and Jerry?
You know the Monaghan twins, Maureen and Moira?
No.
That's a pretty big block, that, he's 47.
Those were all my mother's cousins she was naming.
Oh, no, really?
That's so funny.
All the Halls, yeah.
You know, it's interesting.
I don't know if the listeners heard this, but my headphones I could hear you laughing during the sketch.
And you must have heard it like hundreds of times.
But the timing is so good, and it's so funny.
Yeah, it was fun.
I mean, it's just something about You know just the concept of the sketch that they're from such different worlds and those names are so specific.
It just makes me laugh.
And yeah, still funny to me.
There were conflicts that existed in your parents' marriage.
That also existed in their working relationship.
And.
Your parents had really different approaches to performing and different levels of anxiety.
And before I play a clip that kind of illustrates some of that, I want you to explain what some of the differences were that would get in the way of both performances and the marriage.
Well, I think the core difference was that my dad really wanted to do comedy and I'm not sure my mom really wanted to.
Because she was a dramatic actress before doing comedy.
Yeah.
She was studying with Uta Hagen you know HB Studios in the village and a teacher named Alfred Linder I remember she talked about and was very committed to being a dramatic actress.
And then my dad dreamed of being Eddie Cantor and being a stand-up.
And both of them grew up during the Depression.
And I think for my dad, that was his beacon, his way out were these comedians.
And he had this drive that I'm amazed at what he had to do to get out of that Lower East Side tenement and realize his goal of doing this, which he did.
And when he met my mom, I think he fell in love with her And creatively he was just so connected to her and he saw her brilliance and how good she was at acting.
And also, he knew she was funny.
Maybe it was just in them interacting with each other.
And he drew her into doing this comedy act.
They'd been living together for seven or eight years, married, and were starving actors.
And he had this idea to take their situation and turn it into these little sketches.
And that changed their lives.
But my mother really never had that dream.
So in approaching going on stage and this is the irony I think is really it's always fascinated me is that my mother was naturally great at live performing.
And I feel that my father had to work at it more.
So that was sort of always the dynamic throughout their whole lives when they would approach having to perform.
The preparation was very different and he seemed more anxious about performing.
Even well, i think he, i think he loved to perform, but he needed to just rehearse and go over it again and again.
And i think of myself.
I don't love live performing.
I think i'm probably maybe a little more like my dad that way um, And my mom was much more, I don't know.
She just would kind of go out there and go with it and had just this sort of natural ability to be on stage and let it happen and be comfortable on stage.
We're listening to Terry Gross' conversation with Ben Stiller.
His new documentary is about the lives and careers of his late parents, the comedy duo Stiller and Mira.
He's also an executive producer and primary director of the TV series Severance.
The documentary and Severance are both streaming on Apple TV.
More after a break.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
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What were some of the fun parts for you of having celebrity parents?
And then we'll get to the downside.
I mean, there wasn't, honestly, it was a lot of fun.
It's so interesting because, when you really analyze it, to think about what the downside was at the time, there wasn't a downside for us as kids.
We were just living in this world where my parents would go out and either they go out late and play a nightclub.
I remember when they played nightclubs in New York, and that was really exciting for us.
We get to stay up late, hang out with the grownups, interesting, funny people coming in and out of the house.
They would have these New Year's Eve parties my parents at their apartment in the late 70s and the 80s.
That were just amazing.
And As kids, it was really fun to be around.
I loved going on sets when they would go out to LA if they'd do a show like Courtship of Eddie's Father, or to be on the Paramount Studios lot.
And for me, it made me want to make movies, being around that.
It was very clear early on that that's what I wanted to do.
So it was a lot of fun times and more interesting to my sister and I than school, for sure.
You and your sister Amy were on talk shows with your parents.
And once you even played, was this with Mike Douglas, that you played a violin duet of chopsticks with her.
Yeah, yeah.
It was awful.
It was awful.
There's cutaways to your parents laughing as you both play violin and perform.
I bet you didn't know at the time that they were laughing.
I mean, I look at their faces because basically what they?
You know, they were co-hosting the Mike Douglas show.
And what that meant was they would sit there with him as all the other guests came on and they would do a week of shows in one day down in Philadelphia.
And so they would send a limousine.
Again, this was very exciting for us as kids.
They send a limousine up to New York and we go down with my parents in the limo.
They do two shows in the morning.
We'd go to a restaurant called Bookbinders for lunch.
That I remember as a kid where they had lobsters in a tank and it was just all very, you know, really exciting.
Then they go do the other shows and go home.
And I guess one time they brought us on, you know, because they were just looking for bits to do.
And I think when I watch them laughing, I see them laughing but also like inside, because we're so not good.
Yeah.
But they're like, oh, this is all right.
The audience is enjoying this, but we're kind of like, oh, I want my kids to do good.
But and also like, why did we put them in this situation?
I feel all that when I look at their faces.
Well, speaking of putting you in that situation, were there times that you were uncomfortable being on the talk show set and being asked questions by whoever was hosting that particular show?
Because I kind of question whether it's fair to the kids to put them in something that they're too young to understand what it means to be on TV and what the consequences or what the upside might be.
Yeah.
I mean, I even did it with my daughter.
And I have that in the movie too, where I put her in Secret Life of Walter Mitty when she was eight.
And then I cut the part out, which I don't recommend ever doing that.
But I put her in the movie and then I cut the scene out of the movie because the scene wasn't, you know, right for the movie.
But of course, you know, all my daughter remembers that I cut her out when she was eight years old.
But it's the same feeling, though, on the set.
You put a kid in that situation as it was happening.
I'm like, oh man, this is so much pressure on her.
And then I was feeling the pressure too, and I'm sure that's what my parents were feeling at the time.
But not thinking it through.
I think at the time they were just sort of like yeah, this would be a fun thing to do.
And we probably said to them, yeah, yeah, yeah, we want to do it, we want to do it.
You know, not thinking of what the implications could be in terms of, you know, psychological trauma years later.
What were the consequences?
I mean, I don't feel like I was traumatized from that experience.
But I remember other little things.
I mean, when you're a kid, things like that obviously affect you on a deep level.
You just, you know, it's how you process it later and sometimes you don't realize.
I remember just thinking about being on a game show set.
I remember when my parents were doing the 10000 pyramid once and they had this area on the set called the winner's circle, where you go for the final round.
And they had two chairs where the contestant and the star would sit opposite each other, and there were microphones set up.
And I remember at lunchtime I went down to the winner's circle and sat in the chair and I touched the microphone and the microphone moved.
And then a stage manager or someone yelled at me and said, hey, hey, don't move that.
That microphone was set for whichever actor was there.
And that, I remember my whole life as being traumatized by that.
So things like that when you're a kid, in a grown-up situation can really affect you.
You think that your mother was not always comfortable with being a mother, that she found it kind of stressful and you think that's in part because she lost her mother when she was 10.
During part of her formative years, she didn't have a mother who she could later model herself on or decide.
I'm not going to do it that way.
I'm going to do it my way.
Did you sense that discomfort when you were a child?
Yeah, and she talked about it a lot when she was older.
Yeah, that she lost her mom when she was about 10.
She was an only child.
This was in 1941, I think.
And she, you know, I think it was a really lonely, tough childhood for her.
Her dad loved her and did as much as he could for her.
But I think when she finally had kids...
She was daunted by how to be a mom.
And then, of course, having to then balance that with the performing.
She wanted to have kids.
But then when she also had to do all of this high-pressure live performing when the kids were at such a young age, I can imagine that was a really, really hard thing for her.
And I sensed it subconsciously, I think. as a kid.
Of course, you just absorb everything from your parents when you're a kid and when you're around them.
So stuff that you are aware of, stuff you're not aware of.
And I felt it.
I felt the tension with her and my dad when they would be getting ready to perform.
And I talk about the drinking in the movie.
That was something that wasn't discussed in our, And I think it was because my dad didn't really know how to deal with that.
And he was trying the best he could to figure out how to manage this relationship and this marriage and this working relationship that was their livelihood.
So we sensed it, but it was stuff that I kind of processed later in life.
So you really enjoyed going to clubs where your parents were performing or to the Ed Sullivan Show.
But also, although you loved hanging out with your parents and the other stars, one of the tough parts of having parents in a comedy duo was that they were gone a lot.
They toured a lot.
You're on the Ed Sullivan Show.
You know over 30 times and you're going to get booked all over the country.
Yeah.
So they became pretty famous.
I remember seeing them on at Sullivan.
So you were without your parents a good deal of the time.
And the person who was with you was your nanny, who partly raised you.
So what was your life like when they were gone?
How did that absence affect you?
Yeah.
So Hazel Hugh was our nanny.
Hazel took care of us and was you know, basically since I think the time that I was probably about four years old.
And she was from Jamaica and she had seven kids of her own.
And they lived in Brooklyn.
And we became very close with her family, with her kids, because they were you know, some of them were Amy and my age.
And my parents would go away for like a two-week stint to LA to do whichever show game show or love boat or whatever it was.
And, you know, Hazel was, you know, she was so sweet.
She knew she had to be the disciplinarian and keep us in line.
But we would also kind of have our own secret world going on, my sister and I.
And it was kind of like a free-for-all a little bit when we were on our own.
You know, we'd stay up late sometimes to try to sneak out.
And as we got older and became teenagers, you know, then there were other things going on.
Like my sister started going to Studio 54 when she was, I think she was like 17.
And I guess I can talk about this, Terry, now.
I was 13 then.
And she would take me to Studio 54 with her friends and sneak us in.
How did you get into Studio 54?
You know what Studio 54, like the whole thing was outside.
There's like people waiting to get in, right?
The bouncers have to choose you.
Yeah, part of it depended on how attractive you were.
Exactly.
And how they were curating the night, right?
And this guy Mark was the main bouncer.
Somehow...
Amy, my sister and her friend, Vicki, they had gotten in with him.
And, you know, it's a question.
Amy and I have talked about whether or not he knew that our parents were, you know, Stiller and Mira.
Maybe that had something to do with it.
I don't know.
But he would pick them to go in.
And one night Amy said to me Amy and Vicki said like we're going to dress you up and we're going to take you to Studio 54.
We're going to get you in.
This is when my parents were out of town.
And they put me in a yellow and green polka-dotted Fiorucci shirt.
Fiorucci was the store at the time that was like the cool fashion store.
And an army jacket and these Mickey Mouse sunglasses.
And we went up and Mark saw us and he like pointed to us and like, you know, said, come on in.
And we were in.
And that happened a few times.
So I think I was 13.
Well, one of the things Studio 54 was famous for was people doing a lot of coke.
What did you see that you probably shouldn't have been exposed to?
I mean, I don't remember seeing people like doing stuff like that in the bathrooms or like you know, but I remember being in the upper the balcony and seeing there were like people making out and the average white band.
I remember talking to the average white band there.
And for people who don't know the band, that's the name of the band.
The Average White Band was a band from the 70s.
You're not calling a band of white people average.
Yeah.
But, I mean, I remember dancing, too, and being really into dancing there.
And yeah, it was a little bit, you know.
Look, it was definitely, you know, kind of like feral kids out on our own, you know.
Did your parents ever find out some of the things you did when they were gone?
Yeah, they did.
I talked about this on a talk show once, too.
I took LSD when my parents were out doing the love boat once.
I love the comparison between the love boat and you being on a hallucinogenic.
Yeah, and I was the guy who called his parents on LSD.
I called them up in L.A. because I was scared.
I was having a bad trip, and the only time I ever did LSD.
And I talked to him and my mom was really got really mad at me.
And my dad was actually much nicer and kind of tried to help talk me down.
And he said, I understand where you're going through.
When I was 11 years old, I smoked a pell-mell cigarette and I was sick for two days.
And I was like, no, dad, you don't understand.
I don't understand what reality is.
But he was great.
He was actually great about it.
And talking you down?
Yeah, no.
And I was like freaked out a little for a while afterwards.
I was scared, you know, from the experience.
And my dad was so great.
I remember he took me for a drive and he parked the car and he said look, let's just meditate a little bit.
And like he had me close my eyes and just picture a color.
I think it was like purple or something.
He said, just like think of it as a soothing color.
And I don't know if he had been doing some therapy himself that he had this idea to do this.
But he was just actually, you know, really trying to help me kind of, you know, soothe myself and get over this event.
And as opposed to like a parent who was like, you know, like never do that again.
And, you know, you're grounded or whatever.
I think it's wonderful that you felt comfortable enough with your father to call him while you were tripping.
Yeah.
I mean, that's interesting, you know, because that's one of those things you don't think about.
It's just like this visceral gut reaction.
And that's what I did.
And, you know, I guess that does say something about our relationship.
But he was always for me a very spiritual person and very I think that's what people connected with him too, because he had just like a really open heart.
There's a scene in the movie that's a real standout scene.
You're talking to your son, who's kind of interviewing you during part of the film so that you can tell stories and be telling them to someone.
Not only someone, to your own son.
And so you're telling him about how weird it was for you when you were having a conversation with –
Right.
Yeah.
I was talking to my son about how, yeah, growing up with my parents, they would get recognized and.
On the street.
My mom usually wouldn't want to talk to people for a long time, or she'd say hi, but she wanted to just go on and just keep doing her thing.
And my dad would talk to people forever.
Like if someone wanted to talk to him, he would get into conversations about their family and it would just go on and on.
It used to drive my mother crazy.
And as kids, we would feel that when you're little.
You feel that, your parents' attention being taken away from you.
So I was talking about that with Quinn, my son, and he interrupts me.
We'll play what he has to say.
Okay, so here's Quinn.
Well, that's actually hilarious because just a few weeks ago we were all out at a restaurant and I had been stressed about college stuff.
And then the people there wanted to get like a picture with you.
And I remember I was so frustrated, like the world just has to stop to get this picture.
You know what I mean?
So, Ben Stiller, what was it like when your son told you that?
I was surprised yet not surprised.
I was surprised that he actually brought that up in that moment and that the example he was using was so recent.
But it was in that moment I was like OK, this is actually probably a really good moment for the movie.
But I also as a person was feeling like, oh, this is really gosh.
And all I could say in the moment was like, oh yeah, I guess.
I guess I have like a lot of my dad and me.
Or more of my dad in me than my mom.
And it's just that realization that and it wasn't a new realization for me.
But, you know, that thing of like you really try to do better than your parents.
But it's very hard to not make some of the same mistakes that they make.
Were you even aware that you were doing that?
I wasn't aware.
No, I was not.
You know, what surprised me about what he said was because he's 20.
That that had happened, like he said, like last week.
And I thought, well, I thought, well, this is something that happened when he was little, you know.
But the fact that he it actually like affected him still at this age, you know, that actually really did hit me, you know, just as an awareness of like yeah, this is a reality that he had to live with.
I had to live with my own version of it with my parents.
But it's a tough thing.
You are a producer, a director, an actor.
You just finished a documentary about your parents.
So you're dealing with working with other actors, investigating your own family history, running a production company.
How do you deal with all the stress of that and the responsibility?
That's a lot.
Yeah, I mean, it's been a busy time.
For me.
I know the places that I feel comfortable and relaxed and, you know, like the kind of safe haven.
And that, to me, has become going home and being able to like turn it off and figure out how to do that finally.
I think I've figured that out, at least to a certain extent, that I can get home and really enjoy being with my family.
My kids are both out of the house now, but, you know, when they're around, it's great.
But with Christine, you know, just hanging out together and watching, you know, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills with my daughter, or you know something like that.
Or you know kind of just finding those moments to kind of like unplug.
You know, I've found that that really, really helps.
And then I you know, the other thing is just enjoying the work and the projects that I'm working on, that I'm only working on things I really care about and I really want to be doing.
Ben Stiller's documentary Stiller and Mira, Nothing is Lost, is now streaming on Apple TV.
He spoke with Terry Gross.
Coming up, we'll hear my interview with Pedro Pascal.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
If you've watched TV, gone to the movies or even glanced at a bus stop ad recently, you've probably seen Pedro Pascal staring back at you.
Last year alone, his face has been splashed across posters and billboards for the fantastic four First Steps.
Eddington and Celine Song's Materialists.
Pascal has become one of Hollywood's most magnetic leading men, often playing reluctant protectors, like in The Mandalorian and The Last of Us who find family in the unlikeliest of places.
That connection between found family on screen and his own life came into sharp focus during his Saturday Night Live monologue back in 2023, when he credited his parents for making sacrifices to bring him to the United States from South America, a journey that began with political exile and helped shape a career defined in part by portraying outsiders finding their way in.
That combination of personal history and on-screen vulnerability has made him something rare in Hollywood, a star that people feel like they know.
A recent New Yorker cartoon captured it perfectly.
A therapist tells a client that lately a lot of people are reporting that their faith in humanity is riding entirely on whether or not Pedro Pascal is as nice as he seems.
Pedro Pascal, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you.
What was it about acting?
Because you started talking about wanting to be an actor at, like, four years old?
Well, I was born in 75.
And just think about seeing E.T. in the movie theater, you know?
Think about seeing Poltergeist and the Goonies and, you know, Gremlins and, you know.
So I was very, very easy source of building a fantasy of you know, wishing you were either living these adventures, experiencing these adventures, or part of the adventure of telling those stories.
Yeah.
You know?
I keep coming across these little details, like you being obsessed with the color purple.
Yeah.
James Baldwin for colored girls to kill a mockingbird.
So you were really into literature as well.
And I'm trying to piece together who is this kid?
How would you describe yourself back then?
You were a deeply feeling child, but what did these worlds provide for you?
Because you know they're entertaining for everyone else.
But it sounds like there was another step for you where you felt immersed in them.
Well, I think being moved. you feel very alive.
You feel very inspired, you know, and in school in a way, by incredible storytelling, incredible performances, incredible literature.
You know.
So the process around The Color Purple is very interesting because we had cable TV and Whoopi Goldberg had a televised show that had been transferred to Broadway and then shot for television, for HBO.
It was just called Whoopi.
Yes.
And she was playing a bunch of different characters, and I...
I was just floored.
It was magic.
And with that show, Whoopi, I mean, I saw that so many times.
I could do some of her monologues.
The hair in the towel.
Oh, my gosh.
And he said, okay.
I said, okay.
We said, okay, okay.
And I mean, I literally haven't seen that since, I think, the 80s.
And it's imprinted, right?
And then...
I'm walking out of a movie and I see a poster of this like silhouette of Whoopi Goldberg in a rocking chair with purple and Steven Spielberg's name on it.
And her name, Whoopi Goldberg, in the color purple.
And I'm just like...
Here I am completely moved by the marketing of it.
And I think the movie is a masterpiece.
And I think it's one of the greatest screen performances in the history of cinema that she did in her life.
Purely freshman experience, her first time on camera yeah, on film yeah, her first movie role.
Right, i know i just was frankly overwhelmed, you know, by it in the best way and i couldn't let it go.
So i had to get the book and i read the book.
You'd walk around with the book.
I would hold it.
Yeah, i will.
I would hold it like a, like a, like a treasure.
Your mom saw this in you.
She saw this and wanted to connect with you because of it.
You guys would have these family movie nights?
Yeah, yeah.
Describe what that was like.
My dad was the moviegoer.
My mom was selective.
She would notice much more if I was really into a book.
Mm-hmm.
Or if Prince was in it.
So you were a big Prince fan.
No, she was the Prince fan.
She was the huge Prince fan, which by proxy made me a big Prince fan.
And that's around Purple Rain time.
Oh, yeah.
What were these movie nights like, these family movie nights?
Well, Purple Rain is a perfect example of where we all went together.
My dad would try to take us on a school night whenever he got a chance to whatever he wanted to see.
But Purple Rain was like, we're all going.
And I guess they're sort of, you know, my most special memories.
We're very sort of like movie-going family.
My older sister has a love of dance and did ballet.
So we would go to the... As a child, she studied ballet, and so we would go to the ballet a lot.
I hated it at first until I saw, I think, a really hilarious...
Production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
And then started to kind of really appreciate the kind of storytelling that happened through dance.
Did you ever dance?
I didn't.
I didn't dance.
I mean, I danced, you know, like at...
At any chance I got.
Yeah, to Prince and stuff.
Yeah.
I danced around the house.
I danced around my parents' parties, Christmas, New Year's, all that stuff.
I never took class.
But then in a performing arts program that my mother found that I went to from my freshman year in high school to graduation, you had to study dance.
You know, did West Side Story and and I love dancing and actually got sort of really seriously into I guess what you would call sort of post modern style of improvisational dance.
Um, in college,
And that was the only work I could get when I graduated actually were through movement professors and doing um A lot of downtown stuff.
When you say downtown, what do you mean?
South of 14th Street, St.
Mark's Church, Lower East Side, East Village, site-specific performances.
There's this piece called Demeter's Daughter that was conceived by a choreographer named Tamar Rogoff, who is a lifelong family friend and mentor to Claire Danes.
What kinds of stuff would you do for them?
Yeah.
Like postmodern dance, like, you know, sort of create movement and dance.
And then it wasn't the kind of thing like, this is the choreography, learn it.
It was like, let's move and let's write this together.
Kind of like improvisation, but for the body.
For body movement.
I'm so fascinated about that physicality because there is a holding of the body in all the characters that you play.
I'm thinking about in The Last of Us.
How would you describe what Joel is holding in his body?
Yeah.
Holding a lot of trauma, one.
And then... in a more simple way.
This is a man who works with his hands.
He's a contractor.
And he builds things.
He, I think, expresses himself through his physical relationship to work and to maintenance and that kind of thing.
So it's sort of like understanding a person who works very roughly with his hands and is in sort of a very consistent relationship to physical labor, you know, in a way that he probably loves, because it's way easier than having a conversation.
Right, right.
But it's so fascinating about you and your history with dancing because, I mean, so much of –
Well, so much of your acting is so physical.
I'm just thinking about a lot of films that you're in.
There's so much silent power in what you're doing, but it's through your body that you're telling the story.
Well, Game of Thrones being a perfect example of experiencing that level of exposure for a part.
And one would argue that what the role is most known for is the fight.
Yes.
And that is more dance than you can possibly believe if you don't want to get killed anyway.
That is physicality in its purest form.
And that is choreography in its purest form.
So it's just ironic because I was already pushing 40 when that job happened.
And so the doors that opened were frankly, leaning in the world of action and a lot of highly highly, highly physical choreography in the experiences, more so than I could have ever imagined before.
Having had a lot of fight, choreography on stage in Shakespeare and all that, but this was another level.
Your family history is fascinating because your parents fled Chile when you were a baby.
Growing up, what was the story that you heard?
You know, I didn't hear any stories about it, actually.
And I hear stories now because I ask.
And I also am met with the sort of desire to share and desire to tell stories.
What it meant for, you know, my father's sisters to say goodbye to their brother in that way.
For my mother's family to live in the terror of the experience of her going into hiding.
Because what's the story?
Because the story that you came to learn, your parents were very young.
You were a baby and they fled from South America to the United States to Texas.
Yes.
Yes.
We had asylum in Denmark first and were likely to stay there, were it not for somebody that helped hire my father into his lab in San Antonio, Texas.
Why were your parents exiled?
Oh, well, they were involved in the opposition movement against the military regime under Pinochet.
They were Allende supporters, and frankly, just very young and liberal.
Wow.
And my mother's side of the family there's a cousin of my mother's, Andres Pascal, who was a leader of the opposition movement.
And so that, I think, just by association, sort of could put the name and family in peril.
But there was someone who brought an injured man to my mother's and father's home, knowing that my father was doing his residency at a hospital, and asked for help.
He'd been shot in the leg.
It was a priest who brought him over to our house.
And, you know, at this point I'm an infant, so obviously I have no memory.
But the priest was taken into custody and he was tortured and he gave names.
And then they went looking for my parents.
And, you know, and so they had to, you know, go into hiding and find a way to survive.
There are a lot of details that kind of go into it that create such a fascinating story.
The odd circumstance of my father finding out that someone was in the lobby asking for his name and a patient that kind of interrupted the moment where the officer was about to ask my father who he was or his name, if he was in fact Dr Balmaceda.
And a patient that was like, you know, I'm in pain and no one is attending to me.
And I almost wonder.
I mean, you know you've got to be careful because you know how much story do you build around it and what's really real?
But this was this chance circumstance that gave my father the opportunity to sneak out the back door.
To go and get my mother and go into hiding.
And they were right because they came to the house.
They tore everything apart.
And it was about six months before they found a plan to sneak into the Venezuelan embassy and claim asylum and be reunited with my sister and I.
What a story to learn in adulthood.
It's not a lore.
It's not a story you grew up knowing and having pride in.
Right.
I had a sense of it.
I remember one very, very vivid experience of seeing the movie missing.
See, this is the funny thing is that like, here we are, this nuclear family in the suburbs of San Antonio Texas, with this not distant legacy of
Escape.
I mean, the dictatorship was continuing on.
And I'm seeing a movie about it in my house.
And Sissy Spacek is the size of my mother.
The age of my mother.
And the movie Missing by Costa Gravas.
And her...
You know, being out in the streets past curfew by accident and her life being in peril and me somehow putting all of that together and understanding that sort of placing my mother in that circumstance as a child and just like absolutely falling apart.
How old are you?
When the movie came out in, I must have been like, I don't know, maybe seven.
Wow.
Yeah.
It was a different time.
Parents were letting us watch whatever was on TV.
But I'm saying wow about you piecing that together and somehow understanding Sissy Spacek is my mom.
Yeah.
Feeling that way.
Feeling that way.
Feeling that way in that moment.
And it had to stop.
I fell apart.
You literally started crying.
Oh, I started.
I think something bordering on howling.
I was so traumatized by the idea.
Did you ever get to talk to your mom about it?
I don't know.
I never got a chance to talk to my mom about it the way I'm talking to you about it.
You know, unfortunately, I wonder if she understood.
But, yeah, I guess just to answer it simply, no, not really.
When you say you wonder if she understood, what do you mean?
If she understood that I was kind of a son who was scared for her, you know, and kind of absorbing the context but not really knowing how to process the context.
Movies have been so important to you in your life.
Everything.
Yeah.
They allow you to understand the world.
Yeah, yeah.
And now you're doing that for other people.
Do you ever think about it like that?
I feel profound gratitude to be doing something that I love to do and the people that I get to do it with.
And being sort of always a part of an experience, whether it's well-received or not, But always.
Everyone involved is putting their entire selves and bodies into and cares so much about making it.
And it's very bonding.
It's very fun.
And I don't know anything else.
Oh, Pedro, this has been great.
Thank you, Tanya.
Thank you so much for having me.
I can't tell you, this is part of my little pinch me moment.
I told you before we started, I've been listening to NPR through my parents since I was a teenager and my entire adult life.
I've been listening to fresh air forever.
And getting to sit here with you is very special.
Pedro Pascal stars in The Last of Us.
His recent films are The Fantastic Four, First Steps, Eddington, and Celine Song's Materialists.
Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden.
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Whistler.
With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.
