Pedro Pascal and Steven Yeun are two breezes from the same tribe, bonding over Mad Max style road rage and an unholy ragnarok. Out of an unboxing from Entertainment Weekly, Pascal fired off on a recent experience with a driver who spat a “big glob of saliva” on his car.
“Yesterday was a day. It was my fault. I’ve had three incidents, and they’ve all been my fault,” Pascal told Yeun, who stars in Netflix’s road wrath dramedy Beef. “I cut somebody off, and I look over, and there’s a big glob of saliva — like visual effects put it there, man — just dripping down the side of the passenger window. And my sister was like, “F—!”
“Holy s—. Like a glob from the driver’s side? He just hocked a hard loogie at you?” asked Yeun.
“He spit at me,” confirmed Pascal (The Mandalorian, Game of Thrones). “I was in shock. It didn’t trigger any rage out of me. It absolutely humbled me and shocked me, scared me a little bit, disturbed me.”
“I wonder if your consciousness about not reacting to that negatively is you recognizing that person’s trying to connect with you in some way,” Yeun responded, recalling that he was also recently “flipped off” by some pre-zombie while driving.
“They want me to drink in their saliva,” replied Pascal. “It made me feel guilty. I was like, ‘Gosh, people are going through shit.'”
Yeun, who died on The Walking Dead, felt “weirdly connected… in multitude of ways” to Pascal since he voices Joel Miller in the video game adaptation of HBO’s The Last of Us, which also focuses on a strictly nightmarish world hallowed out by a feral pandemic.
“One is when I was shooting The Walking Dead — show that is kind of spiritually connected to your show — The Last of Us game came out, and I played it 12 hours straight,” shared Yeun (Nope, Invincible). “I remember finishing it and then coming to set the next day being catatonic. Like, ‘Guys, I just experienced something.’ And then to see you play that part. You fall into your characters in a way that I think is so gracious.”
Pascal disclosed that he hasn’t yet watched the season one finale of The Last of Us, even though it aired in March. “I haven’t done anything for that amount of time before, and so my attachment to the experience is strange. As a guy who’s pushing 50, to feel this very innocent, semi-angry, emotional attachment to an experience that’s over… I think it was like falling in love, and at the point where you’re like, ‘I don’t fall in love.’ You know? Because it hurts too much.”
In the finale, Joel and Ellie, played by Bella Ramsey (Hilda, Catherine Called Birdy), finally reached the Firefly base where Joel refused to sacrifice Ellie’s life for the cure, resulting in the deaths of everyone at the hospital.
Series creator Craig Mazin (Chernobyl, The Hangover Part II) stated, “I’m not suggesting that I have a hard opinion about how things go at the end — and I don’t. I’m confused about it morally. I think it’s a difficult choice. I go back and forth, and I think a lot of people will go back and forth on it.”