Inside Pedro Pascal’s tragic past and family scandal as actor becomes Hollywood’s hottest leading man

It’s safe to say that Pedro Pascal is Hollywood’s most popular leading man right now. 

From taking over the small screen in The Last of Us and The Mandalorian, to leading box office hits like Gladiator II, Materialists, and The Fantastic Four, Pascal is utterly inescapable right now. 

Pascal’s path to fame and fortune hasn’t been easy though, beginning with his childhood in Santiago, Chile.

When he was just four months old, his parents were forced to flee Chile so that they could avoid capture under General Augusto Pinochet, who plunged the country into a military dictatorship in 1973.

Pascal’s mother Veronica, a psychologist, and his father Jose Balmaceda, a fertility doctor, were deemed enemies of the state due to Veronica’s distant family ties to socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown by Pinochet.

The family escaped to Denmark before relocating to the United States, but this wasn’t the end of their troubles. 

In 1995, Pascal’s father was swept up in a jaw-dropping fertility scandal that caused him to flee the U.S. and head back to Chile.

He was later charged with mail fraud and income tax evasion. 

According to Orange County Register, Balmaceda was caught ‘switching frozen embryos of women without their knowledge’ at the fertility clinic he helped run with two other men.

‘In 1995, the Orange County Register reported that Dr. Ricardo Asch, along with Dr. Balmaceda and Dr. Sergio Stone, had taken women’s eggs without their permission and given them to other women who later bore children from those eggs,’ the report said.

‘At least 15 live births resulted from the improper transfers, and the clinic was shuttered following the egg-theft scandal.’

In addition, it said that ‘an audit determined that nearly $1 million in clinic income had not been reported’ including ‘tens of thousands of dollars in cash payments from patients that were allegedly pocketed by doctors.’

While Stone was convicted of fraud, both Balmaceda and Asch fled the U.S. before their trials – with Balmaceda, Pedro’s mother, and his two siblings moving back to Chile.

Asch was later arrested in Mexico, where he had escaped to. 

According to the New York Times, Balmaceda was able to restart his life in Chile and continued working as one of the country’s top fertility doctors. 

Years later – in 2022 – Balmaceda finally plead guilty to tax fraud and surrendered himself to law enforcement.

ABC News dubbed the debacle ‘one of the biggest fertility scandals in history’. 

Despite his father’s scandalous past, Pascal and Balmaceda appear to be close, often sharing photos together on social media. 

Pedro even brought his dad, as well as his sister, transgender actress Lux Pascal, to the Gladiator II premiere in London last year. 

He has never publicly addressed his dad’s fertility scandal, instead choosing to focus on the struggles that his parents overcame by escaping Pinochet’s regime in Chile.  

Speaking about their journey in a SNL monologue, Pascal said, ‘They were so brave. And without them, I wouldn’t be here in this wonderful country, and I certainly wouldn’t be standing here with you all tonight.’

Tragically, Pascal’s beloved mother Veronica took her own life in 1999.  

The Last of Us Star has spoken out numerous times about the huge impact she had on him, with him telling People in 2020, ‘She was the love of my life.’

He continued: ‘She was always incredibly supportive, never a stage mom. I always felt like she knew something that I didn’t. None of my success would be real if it weren’t for her.

‘I think about her every day. I don’t pray, so I can’t say I have a religious practice to feel close to her, but I live for her, even though she’s gone.

‘Losing the most important person in your life, discovering that something like this is possible and that what you fear most in life can happen, is an unexplainable and permanent moment. There is a before and after her death.’

‘The circumstances of my mother’s death made it very hard for us to remember her as the person she was,’ he also admitted in a 2017 interview with Paula magazine.

‘It hurts so much… Sometimes I feel anguished and I try to deal with it in the best possible way, because I know that my mother would not want me to do it any other way.’

Following her passing, Pedro decided to take on her maiden name as a tribute to her – officially making his stage name Pedro Pascal.

While there’s been endless speculation online about Pascal’s sexuality and romantic life, the Eddington hunk prefers to keep his relationships private.

‘I’ve had dreams of taking my kids to the movies the way my parents took me,’ he once lamented to Vanity Fair. 

‘So I guess I want a shortcut to an interesting human being, who is my child, who will go see something that I want to see.’ 

However, despite refusing to publicly reveal his romantic partners to the world, Pascal claims that he isn’t actually a private person.

‘I always feel perplexed when I’m identified in whatever form of media as a “highly private person,” because that’s the opposite of me,’ Pascal explained. 

He continued: ‘I’m very unprivate in my private life. I just know that personal relationships are such a complex thing to navigate even without having this enormous lens on them.’ 

Pascal is currently enjoying the success of his latest film, The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

The Marvel movie launched with a bigger-than-expected opening weekend, raking in an estimated $118 million domestically and another $100 million overseas, for a global debut of around $220 million.