Pedro Pascal was considered for a role in HBO’s Looking, says casting director
"He was testing on a million things"
HBO’s Looking debuted ten years ago and it’s amazing what we’re still learning about the series. This includes that Pedro Pascal was at one time considered for the show.
Looking focused on the lives of gay men in San Francisco and starred the likes of Jonathan Groff, Murray Bartlett, and Russell Tovey among others.
In a retrospective with GQ many of the show’s core cast and creatives have shared their memories of the show. Among those was casting director Carmen Cuba who shared some bits about how the show was cast.
Cuba revealed there wasn’t a “mandate” to cast queer actors in queer roles with Andrew Haigh, the writer/director, reinforcing that. Cuba told GQ: “Especially in TV, you meet a lot of people… Pedro Pascal was someone we met [for a role on Looking] and from that, I put him on Narcos.”
She continued: “The thing with Pedro, it was like he was testing on a million things. So many of these things, as you know in casting, it’s just like scheduling. Does scheduling work? Does the group? Because in this, we were really casting a group.”
It’s not clarified which role The Last of Us star was seen for. Though we can imagine it would have been a role like Dom, played by Murray Bartlett.
Pascal’s involvement is not the only near-miss related to Looking we’ve heard of lately. At a screening of All of Us Strangers recently Russell Tovey revealed he was nearly cast in the lead role of Patrick. The role eventually went to Jonathan Groff and Tovey was then cast as Kevin.
In conversation with Haigh, the director of All of Us Strangers, Tovey said: “I remember there was two days where I knew it was between me and Jonathan Groff.” He also shared how he found out he had missed out on the lead role. “I found out via Twitter that I hadn’t got the role because they put it out online and I was having a wee in the middle of the night.”
Tovey also shared that he’d spoken with Haigh at the time about being written into the show if he wasn’t cast as Patrick. So it all worked out in the end!