Some of Hollywood’s most fun celebrity interactions in recent months came thanks to two of HBO’s biggest headline-makers in recent years: The Last of Us star Pedro Pascal and Succession’s Kieran Culkin. From the latter’s Golden Globes jab at Pascal to the Game of Thrones’ vet’s comeback on the Emmys stage (in which he facetiously blamed Culkin for an arm injury), they’re a fun pair to watch. And it’s a particularly good time seeing the Roman Roy actor reacting to The Mandalorian star’s strangely enigmatic method of remembering his lines.
With fans waiting patiently for The Last of Us Season 2 to hit the TV premiere schedule, and for Culkin’s new movie A Real Pain to get a release date, the two actors took part in a SAG-AFTRA Foundation interview along with Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen and The Morning Show’s Billy Crudup. Pascal shared a particularly horrifying anecdote about whiffing his lines during a Shakespeare in the Park performance, and soon befuddled his fellow thespians by retrieving a seemingly random chart of letters, explaining it as his current go-to method. In his words:
I bet I could find and show you, like, the psychotic example, this physical example that I have now that I have to do to learn my lines. [Holds up paper filled with letters.] So this is this psycho first letter of every word…
The chart itself sparked the first completely understandable reaction from Kieran Culkin, which is presumably similar to how most non-actors reacted after seeing it in the video.
And before anyone else could make a move to compare Pedro Pascal to a murderous lunatic, he was already all over that when he continued trying to explain his process without ever quite doing so in full.
So you just see a bunch of letters, right? So basically…I’m the Unabomer. You just use the first letter of each word, and in kind of these sort of like towers — these columns, I guess — and then it’s this very, very tedious way of making yourself learn the line, so that you’re not, I suppose, making choices if you’re in a scramble and trying to learn text really quickly. It isn’t even that artistic. It really is kind of like a technical way, I guess, that I’ve had to acquire it, because of that horrible experience of forgetting your lines.
Really, the sheet of letters is almost secondary to the amusingly scrambled explanation that Pedro Pascal goes with. It's not quite irony that he's unable to ad-lib a concise description of this part of his performance-building process, but it's in the same ballpark.
Not that understanding the idea from front to back would make it any less bonkers that it exists in general. Which isn't to say that his method of memorizing the first letters of lines is ill-conceived or faulty, since it's clearly working for him and anyone else who engages with it. But I think we can all agree that Kieran Culkin's facial expressions during Pascal's chat are perfectly relatable.
He goes from "What in the world?" to "Who even is this guy?" to "What is anything?" And I'm there with him every step of the way. Though with slightly less snazzy hair. (And my hair is sorta snazzy.)
Check out the full interview below, with the line-memorization discussion happening around the 20-minute mark.
Both Succession and The Last of Us are available to stream with a Max subscription. Check out some of my favorite Cousin Greg lines from the now-concluded drama while pondering how co-star Nicholas Braun committed them to memory.
