Sarah Paulson Reveals She'd Give Pedro Pascal Money for Food When He Was a Struggling Actor

While speaking with Esquire as part of Pascal's cover story, the actress shared that "there were times" she would help Pascal out financially by giving him money from her per diem acting jobs so that he could eat.

Paulson and Pascal's friendship dates all the way back to 1993, when the latter moved to New York City to attend NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

Reflecting on the early years of their friendship, Paulson said, "We would go to see movies all the time in those years, and we would get so lost in them. You can fill in the blanks about the why of that however you like, but I think there were things we wanted to escape mentally, emotionally, spiritually."

A couple of years after he graduated college, Pascal moved to Los Angeles, where he booked some roles on a few television shows, including "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." However, his career hadn't taken off yet. He returned to New York City around 2000 to take another stab at it but still struggled to make ends meet. And Paulson stepped in to help her friend.

"He's talked about this publicly," Paulson, 48, told Esquire, "but there were times when I would give him my per diem from a job I was working on so that he could have money to feed himself."

Looking back, Pascal said, "I died so many deaths. My vision of it was that if I didn't have some major exposure by the time I was 29 years old, it was over, so I was constantly readjusting what it meant to commit my life to this profession, and giving up the idea of it looking like I thought it would when I was a kid. There were so many good reasons to let that delusion go."

Cut to two decades later, Pascal, now 48, is, as Paulson said, a "superstar." The actor is the lead on not one, but two hit TV shows -- the Disney+ "Star Wars" spinoff series, "The Mandalorian," and the HBO drama, "The Last of Us" -- and has several upcoming projects in the pipeline.

"Everybody wants a piece of him," Paulson said, adding, "You just want him to succeed. And that to me, I feel like, is the sign of a major movie star. I’m ready for him to take the reins from the guys from romantic comedies past, like Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson and all these guys. He can be all that. Let's remake 'Die Hard' with Pedro. Remake all the 'Lethal Weapon' movies with Pedro."

In the same interview, Paulson also chimed in on all the now-famous "Daddy" talk surrounding Pascal.

"Knowing Pedro as intimately as I do, I would not want him to be my daddy, personally," Paulson quipped. "I want him to be my pal that I can hang out with until all hours of the night, but Daddy?"

"The Last of Us" showrunner Craig Mazin shared his thoughts on why he believes fans have attached the term to him.

"I think everybody either has fond memories of a positive father figure in their life or they have a terrible gaping space in their heart where a positive father figure ought to have been," he told Esquire. "Nostalgia or longing for let's call it nontoxic masculinity. And he has that, but he also has this expressive pain behind his eyes."

Pascal -- who has continuously been asked about the "daddy" discourse -- simply added, "Plus, I'm old."

Read the full Esquire cover story, here.