The actor, model, and sister of Pedro Pascal had a thriving career in her native Chile—then left it behind to pursue stardom in the US. Her gambit’s paying off.
We hug and exchange pleasantries in Spanish, embracing the implicit sense of trust we Latin Americans often find in each other abroad. Or it could be that Pascal is just like this with everyone. The 33-year-old actor and model was born in wealthy, historically conservative Orange County to Dr.
José Balmaceda, a famed fertility specialist, and Verónica Pascal, a child psychologist. When she was around three years old, Pascal relocated to Santiago, Chile, with her older brother Nicolás and their parents, who had left the country in the 1970s as political exiles under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Pascal’s eldest siblings, Javiera and Pedro, stayed back in the US. Verónica died in 2000. Soon after, Pedro started going professionally by her maiden name in her honor. Lux followed suit when she started acting stateside. She recently guest starred in Ryan Murphy’s The Beauty and appears later this year in Tom Ford’s feature film Cry to Heaven. As we speak, she’s performing in Richard II, an off-Broadway staging that ran through December 21 after two extensions; she filmed an indie movie called Love & Chaos last spring as well. When she’s not acting, Pascal moonlights as a budding fashion It-girl: last October, she was invited to walk Matthieu Blazy’s debut runway collection for Chanel. “Lux is an extraordinary woman, artist, and actress,” Blazy shares over email. “Her bold charisma, unwavering commitment, and unmistakable personal style are remarkable.” Lux speaks fondly of her time as a student at “la Católica”—the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, often ranked as the country’s highest-rated private university. Soon after graduating, she started appearing in Chilean TV series and films, including a few episodes of Narcos alongside Pedro. Pascal occasionally refers to him throughout our conversation, without going very deep; though she doesn’t say so explicitly, she seems eager to form an identity beyond her famous brother. She had recurring theater work in Chile, too. “I was fed a lot by that world,” she says. “I dated an artist who taught me so much of what I use as an actor now.” “I had a rich artistic life,” says Pascal. “I have people in New York and in the United States, but I feel like my soul is in Chile.” Still, she felt a sense of discontent when she lived there—like she’d risen as high as she could. And so she decided to try out for American drama school. “I was like, if I audition for these schools and they want me, that’s a good enough reason to leave my life behind,” Pascal says. Or rather, to leave behind one life and begin another. “At the core of it all, I was leading a life that I wasn’t necessarily happy with,” she says, relaxing into her chair. “I don’t want to get too deep into that, but I wanted to start over. And I did.” I ask how it feels to be on the verge of so much. “It’s almost like I don’t want to believe it because heartbreak is kind of my used-to,” she says. Pascal is lively and animated, but she does not shy away from showing her tender side. She folds it into conversation subtly, letting it show mostly through her striking eyes—a physical feature she shares with Pedro. “Now that I really think about it, I’m working with the first person that taught me what good television was,” she says of Murphy, naming Nip/Tuck as a seminal watch. Ford, too, has been a touchstone: Pascal can walk you through the trailer for A Single Man frame by frame. Seeing it as a tween, “I thought, that is the type of cinema I want to be a part of. It’s… kind of gaggy.” She laughs. At The Juilliard School, Pascal was challenged to unlearn some of the training she’d gotten in Chile. One instructor gave her a transformative piece of advice: “Just do less.” Pascal’s taken it to heart. “I don’t think I had ever felt so alive while acting,” she says, her soft pink acrylic nails fidgeting with a gray wool scarf by Acne Studios. “Just letting things happen instead of doing it.” The night I saw Richard II, claims Pascal, was not a good show for her. “I was como desconectada nomás,” she says—“a little out of it.” I found her captivating, an assessment shared by her co-star Michael Urie. “On stage, Lux is thrilling to play opposite,” he tells me. “Every night is like the first night or the last night: vital and alive.” As a colleague, she’s equally generous in the wings: “She is the first person to check on me if I seem down offstage.” The crowd seemed charmed by her, too—including London-based, New York-born designer Conner Ives, who’d been invited that night by Pascal. Ives is known for cutting the kinds of slinky, fabulous dresses that intensify the beauty of women like Pascal. He gained mainstream recognition last year for an agenda-setting t-shirt he made, emblazoned with an instantly viral slogan: “Protect the Dolls.” The shirt was spotted on celebrities like Troye Sivan, Tilda Swinton, Addison Rae, and, most famously, Pedro Pascal, who wore one to the London premiere of Thunderbolts*. Ives created the shirt as a “love letter” to the many trans women in his life, whom he considers his muses, and to protest the rising political hostility and legislative attacks on trans people, including the Trump administration’s persecution of transgender people; all its proceeds are donated to Trans Lifeline, a trans-led charity. “I first saw Lux in the way you see most people in the 21st Century, online,” Ives tells me later via WhatsApp voice note. “I think I might have known who Lux was before I put together who Pedro was .” They became Instagram friends, then IRL ones. “I remember being absolutely transfixed by her,” he says. “I don’t use the term ‘star quality’ lightly, but she was just so inviting and enveloping—and witty, and quick, and smart. I think she’s a powerhouse.” Last year Pascal also starred in Miss Carbón , a Spanish-Argentine co-production streaming on Netflix in the US that tells the story of Carla Antonella Rodríguez, or Carlita: a trans woman who became the first female miner in Patagonia. She’s remarkable in the lead role—strong, nuanced, emotionally charged. “I know who this woman is,” says Pascal. “I sort of know what she’s been through. This is a person who survived, and who, because of survival, learned that life is worth living if you remain a little elegant. Poised.” It would be easy, reductive, to think that Pascal is also referring to herself here. I ask her if she hesitated at all to make a transition story. “Yes, because I did not want to put myself in a box, and it’s so easy in this industry to put yourself in a box,” she says. “I see myself as an actress that has played parts that aren’t necessarily related to a transition story. But I read the story, and I saw the opportunity of playing the lead in a movie, and that was a challenge worth taking.” Pascal also saw an opportunity to offer a perspective that does not anchor Carlita’s story solely on her transness: “She’s always been a woman. She’s always been who she is.” Instead, Pascal wanted to focus on Carlita as “a force of nature, an impeccable hard worker, and someone who opened the door for women in that workplace, period.” Pascal’s inspired by photos of her mother from the ’70s, when she still lived in Chile, and from after her move to the US, when she still “preserved her Chileanness.” It’s the same sartorial energy Pascal says she saw in the upper middle class ladies she grew up around in Santiago—doñas, as we’d refer to them in Spanish. Pascal describes their manicured presentation: perennially fresh blowouts and meticulously stylized wardrobes, neither too prim nor too stylish. “I love them, Chilean women.” She pauses. “I am a Chilean woman.” Films from her teenage years helped inform her identity as well. Pascal has a deep connection to The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola’s 1999 feature directorial debut, which stars Kirsten Dunst as Lux Lisbon—one of five sisters raised by overprotective Catholic parents. Pascal didn’t name herself after the character, at least not solely. As she reminds me, “lux” means light in Latin. Rosalía used the same word for the title of her latest album, and Pascal noticed: “Going back to Miss Carbón and Carlita, to Rosalía and to all these people, they’re just trying to find the light,” she says. In periods of darkness, she adds, that’s precisely what one should do. This time, she clearly is speaking about herself. “It’s so much of what acting is about, and being onstage, and being on the runway,” Pascal says, those brown eyes wide. “Finding your light.” Hair products by Rōz; makeup products by Dior; hair, Blake Erik; makeup, Francelle Daly; tailor, Jacqui Bennett. Produced on location by Very Rare Productions. For details, go to VF.com/credits.
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