Sarah Paulson gave Pedro Pascal money so he could 'feed himself' as a struggling actor

Sarah Paulson and Pedro Pascal's three-decades-long friendship has been going strong since meeting when they were 18. The duo is Hollywood's most in-demand actors, often pictured at red-carpet events together, but that was not always the case.

In a new Esquire cover story, Paulson revealed that she financially supported Pascal in the early 2000s while he was struggling to make it as a working actor. The "Ratched" actress told the outlet that she would sometimes give Pascal the money she made as part of her acting per diem so that he could feed himself. The two actors first met in 1993 when Pascal came to New York City as a student at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. 

However, by his late twenties, Pascal felt hopeless about the future and worried he would never get his big break. “I died so many deaths,” he said. “My vision of it was that if I didn’t have some major exposure by the time I was twenty-nine years old, it was over, so I was constantly readjusting what it meant to commit my life to this profession, and giving up the idea of it looking like I thought it would when I was a kid. There were so many good reasons to let that delusion go.”

But Pascal found a "family" with some LaGuardia High School graduates in the city, including Paulson. Paulson said the pair even went to the movies together.

“We would go to see movies all the time in those years,” Paulson said, “and we would get so lost in them. You can fill in the blanks about the why of that however you like, but I think there were things we wanted to escape mentally, and spiritually.”

Pascal worked his way through many roadblocks on his journey to superstardom, but now his success is all the more satisfying for his fans in the industry. Today, a lot has changed for Pascal, with breakout roles in "Game of Thrones" as Oberyn Martell and in "Narcos" as Javier Peña. The actor is currently starring in two major TV shows, Disney's "The Mandalorian" and HBO's "The Last of Us."

Craig Mazin, co-creator of "The Last of Us" spoke on Pascal's success over the years. “This was not somebody Hollywood sweated to make a star,” he noted. “They didn’t keep him out, but they didn’t drag him along, either; they just sat there with their arms crossed. And he fought all the way, and every single time, he connected.”

He added: “I’m just honored that my name will be forever near his on a Wikipedia page.” Paulson, on the other hand, called his moment " psychotic," and said that "now everybody wants a piece of him." She told Esquire she believed that Pascal's success is partially due to his connection with the audience and that he has the potential to go even further in his career.

"You just want him to succeed," she said. "And that to me, I feel like, is the sign of a major movie star. I'm ready for him to take the reins from the guys from romantic comedies past, like Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson and all these guys. He can be all that. Let's remake Die Hard with Pedro. Remake all the Lethal Weapon movies with Pedro."

Pascal's acting journey has been very inspirational, and the "Mandalorian" actor said that he has a few more projects in the pipeline, but, for the moment, he plans to keep things low-key. “What’s next? I have no f***king idea,” he shared. “I just hope that I have the maturity to not chase something that would mean more from the outside.”