Pedro Pascal

José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal was born on April 2, 1975, in Santiago, Chile to child psychologist Verónica Pascal Ureta and fertility doctor José Balmaceda Riera, a member of the Castilian-Basque aristocracy. His paternal grandmother was born in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. He has an older sister named Javiera, a younger brother named Nicolás, and a younger sister named Lux, who is an actress and transgender activist. Pascal's mother was the cousin of Andrés Pascal Allende, the nephew of socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende (through his sister Laura). Pascal Allende was an early leader of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, a militant far-left organization. Nine months after his birth, his family sought refuge in the Venezuelan embassy in Santiago, and later received political asylum in Denmark. Ultimately, the family moved to the United States, where Pascal was raised in San Antonio, Texas, until they relocated to Orange County, California, when he was 11 years old. By the time he was eight years old, his family regularly visited Chile to see his 34 cousins. His parents would ultimately move back to Chile in 1995 to raise his two younger siblings. He pursued acting at the Orange County School of the Arts and graduated in 1993, before attending New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he graduated in 1997. After his mother's death, he began using her surname professionally as a tribute to her and because he felt that Americans had difficulty pronouncing his paternal surname, Balmaceda.