Pedro Pascal is having his splashy leading-man moment.
The actor is currently starring in the smash debut season of HBO’s dystopian drama The Last Of Us. He’s also just begun promoting the third season of the Disney+ Star Wars spinoff series The Mandalorian. The back-to-back promo has had him chatting it up on talk shows, hosting Saturday Night Live, and sauntering down many a red carpet. Earlier this week, Forbes declared that “we’ve hit peak Pedro Pascal.” But his recent style moves, in particular, have put him all over the internet.
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It began with a trickle, in early February. A sequined Saint Laurent overcoat at the Last Of Us premiere. A deep green three-piece Dzojchen suit on Fallon. A bright purple Valentino blouse for his SNL monologue.
When it came time to pivot to Mandalorian press, Pascal enlisted the help of Julie Ragolia, an established editorial and runway stylist who also occasionally dresses celebrities—cool ones, like LaKeith Stanfield, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Riz Ahmed. Suddenly, the freak floodgates opened: at the Mandalorian season 3 premiere in London, he wore a pair of billowing red Acne Studios trousers and a toffee-brown, open-knit Acne cardigan cropped at the waist, unbuttoned to show off a ribbed gray tank underneath. The next day, he wore a glittering silver foil cardigan from streetwear veteran Angelo Urrutia’s brand 4S Designs over a saucy sheer top from the fashion-editor-favorite New York label Commission.
Then, at the Mandalorian premiere in LA, he sort of went full-on hunky Golden Girl in head-to-toe Gucci look: a buttery yellow puff-sleeve blouse with a French’s Classic Mustard-toned sweater knotted over his shoulders, with square-framed Andy Wolf glasses and loosey-goosey taupe flares. (Those glasses, along with chunky leather footwear from the French label Adieu, have been a constant.)
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All of these outfits seem to speak to the cheeky persona that Pascal’s fostered online, in turn making them perfect social media catnip. Which, it turns out, is sort of the point. Last week, Ragolia tweeted a photo of Pascal in his red-and-brown Acne outfit alongside her other clients (Stanfield, Gyllenhaal, Ahmed) in similarly eye-catching outfits, writing, “I’m not a celebrity stylist. I just enjoy shaking up the internet for people.” If the usual move for dressing famous cis men is to go classically hunky, dapper, even austere, then Ragolia’s playbook is more about looking hot and fun, kooky and flamboyant.
For the record, Pascal doesn’t exactly need the help: he’s a beloved guy who’s been garnering relatively unsolicited online goodwill (otherwise known as “thirst”) for the last couple of years. Last spring, a clip of the actor delivering a truth on Vanity Fair’s Lie Detector video series—“Daddy is a state of mind, you know what I’m saying? I’m your daddy”—went viral on TikTok, and the audio has provided many a soundtrack to clips of the actor on recent red carpets. (Our British GQ brethren said Pascal’s looks transformed him “from apocalypse daddy to hot professor.”) They are also the polar opposites of Pascal’s macho wardrobe from The Last Of Us, full of rugged workwear and grungy denim. For her part, Ragolia thinks these looks are less about going viral than helping Pedro be Pedro. “I work from instinct as a stylist, and simply wanted to present Pedro’s best self,” she tells GQ via email. “This is what felt right.”
And if Pedro’s best self is a kooky hot grandpa, all power to him.
