Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
Pedro Pascal is at Cannes right now, promoting his new movie, Eddington. Ari Aster’s latest is already sounding, per both its trailer and early critic impressions, kind of intense, set as it is in 2020 small-town America, where conflict breaks out between a mayor (Pascal) and a “law and order”-type sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix). Questions about the film’s parallels to our current political moment were, obviously, inevitable, which is always going to be interesting, because Pascal tends to be a lot more frank with his thoughts than you might expect from a guy who collects that many paychecks with the Disney masthead on them.
Here, for instance, is his response when asked about worries about getting back into the United States, after debuting a film that is so heavily and openly critical of the MAGA mindset: “Fear is the way that they win. So keep telling the stories, keep expressing yourself and keep fighting to be who you are. Fuck the people that try to make you scared, you know? And fight back. This is the perfect way to do so, in telling stories. And don’t let them win.” Pascal was slightly more circumspect when asked a more specific question about immigration, but still put his heart pretty firmly on his sleeve:
Obviously, it’s very scary for an actor participating in a movie to sort of speak to issues like this. It’s far too intimidating the question for me to really address, I’m not informed enough. I want people to be safe and to be protected, and I want very much to live on the right of history. I’m an immigrant. My parents are refugees from Chile. We fled a dictatorship, and I was privileged enough to grow up in the U.S. after asylum in Denmark. If it weren’t for that, I don’t know what would have happened to us. I stand by those protections. I’m too afraid of your question, I hardly remember what it was.
Aster also wasn’t shy about nodding toward the origins of his new film, describing the “state of fear and anxiety” in which he wrote it. “I wanted to show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real anymore. Over the last 20 years, we’ve fallen into this age of hyper-individualism. That social force that used to be central in liberal mass democracies—an agreed upon vision of the world—that is gone now. COVID felt like the moment where that link was finally cut for good. I wanted to make a film about what America feels like, to me. I’m very worried.”
[via Variety]
