To learn his lines, the 'Last Of Us' actor has a mysterious trick up his sleeve which he revealed during the SAG-AFTRA roundtable.
Memorizing multiple lines in just one or two tries is not humanly possible. Particularly, in the movie business, actors are expected to enact several pages of script in one go and it's quite challenging. While some get used to it and build the capability over time, some develop their methods to memorize lines. Recently, the topic of remembering lines came up in one of the roundtables by the SAG-AFTRA Foundation that involved Pedro Pascal, Billy Crudup, Matthew Macfadyen and Kieran Culkin. What caught the internet's attention was Pascal's creepy-yet-funny method of remembering his lines and it's going viral.
Moderator Scott Mantz asked the stars in the roundtable how they remembered their lines and each one of them shared their experience. The "Narcos" star suddenly started searching for a "physical example," which he described as a "psychotic" method that shows how he remembered lines. He then displayed a page from his notebook, with cryptogram kind of ciphers written on it. It had multiple columns of letters that only made sense to him and some were underlined too. Culkin had to look twice before gasping in wonder and Macfadyen was surprised to see those cryptic codes.
"Basically, I'm the Unabomber," Pascal joked and explained how his method works. "You just use the first letter of each word in these, sort of, columns and then it's a very tedious way of making yourself learn the line so that you're not making choices, like if you're in a scramble and trying to learn the text quickly," said the "Mandalorian" actor. He added comically that he had to come up with this "technical way" because of his horrible experiences of forgetting lines. Not just the stars in the roundtable, but many on the internet were astonished by Pascal's "mnemonics" too mostly because they resembled the infamous "Zodiac Killer's" secret code.
Pedro, where were you on December 20th, 1968?
โ Muadโdib stan account (@xweaver1) February 17, 2024
When a user, Beth (@dayasdear), shared this clip on X (previously Twitter) with the caption, "Crying at everyone's reactions to Pedro Pascal showing them how he memorizes his lines," the post blew up and over 12.8 million people viewed it. The comments were nothing short of hilarious. "Is anyone else getting Zodiac cipher vibes? What the h**l, baby, what is that?" commented @lynn_driscoll. "I do that trick but horizontally and it doesn't look that creepy and it works. But that's a whole zodiac letter," wrote @adioraffair.
View this post on Instagram
On Valentine's Day, Marvel Studios announced that Pedro Pascal was all set to play Reed Richards of its renowned superhero team, "Fantastic Four." As the movie is about to hit the screens by July 2025, the internet is wondering if the cipher implied the upcoming movie script. "Imagine if Pedro just flashed the Fantastic Four script and none of us can decipher it," commented @MediaverseCU in a post by @DiscussingFilm sharing the roundtable clip.
I see Reed Richards all over this man, he'll do amazing.
โ Stanley tamz (@StanleyTamz) February 17, 2024
So he really is Reed Richards
โ Trav B Ryan โข Knicks Spawn ๐น๐น๐ญ๐นโ๏ธ๐ฝ (@travbryanmusic) February 17, 2024
The roundtable had many more funny moments as the stars spoke about memorizing lines. Macfadyen said that remembering his lines was just an "idiosyncratic" trait that most actors had and there wasn't a particular way to articulate how he did it. "I think the people who are actors have a brain that is built to internalize text in the same way mathematicians just understand numbers and so everybody takes it for granted that we can memorize anything," added Crudup. However, among others' responses "The Last of Us" actor's casual revelation of his "mnemonics" method is the one that is making quite a buzz on the internet.