By Stacy Torres

During the past year-plus of wars, U.S. National Guard deployments, ICE detentions and killings, strikes on Venezuela—I’m just waiting for frogs to rain down—I’ve found my blissful reprieve in Pedro-mania. I’m talking about the meteoric rise of actor Pedro Pascal, whom I’ve finally discovered and who’s helping me tap into my own hidden superpowers for survival.

And while his new Star Wars movie has racked up lukewarm reviews and disappointing box office sales so far, Pascal’s always-charming media blitz has served as the perfect antidote to our current onslaught of bad news—and just in time before all the good talk show hosts are fired for making us laugh.

Apparently, I’m late to the Pedro lovefest (and minor backlash, if Pete Davidson’s Hollywood saturation meter is accurate). According to comedian Chelsea Handler, 2023 was “the year everyone became horny for Pedro Pascal.” Even still, Pascal topped Google’s 2025 most-searched actor list in the United States. Ordinarily, such relentless exposure would annoy the ever-living, you-know-what out of me. But Pedro’s an exception. His appeal transcends the fickleness of social media adoration as a star uniquely suited to our current moment, with declining Latino representation in Hollywood, rising authoritarianism in the United States and abroad, and free speech crackdowns in the entertainment industry and beyond, including within higher education, which has restricted content for race- and gender-related courses at universities such as Texas A & M.

I’ve fallen madly in like with Pedro (yes, we’re on a first name basis, at least on my end), even though I’ve never seen his acting but for his hilarious, poignant Saturday Night Live appearance. Nor do I have a crush on him. But I like him—at least the bits he’s shared in numerous interviews. Part brother I never knew I wanted, part imaginary friend, Pedro radiates decency with his self-deprecating humor and charm. And especially now, I need that like oxygen. Apparently, I’m not alone. A New Yorker cartoon captioned “Save Us Pedro,” pictures a therapist reassuring his patient, “…lately, a lot of people are reporting their faith in humanity is riding entirely on whether or not Pedro Pascal is as nice as he seems.”

My appreciation runs deeper than any romantic or sexual attraction to everyone’s “Internet boyfriend” or “daddy,” monikers inspired by his father roles, such as in The Mandalorian and The Last of Us. Pedro reminds me too much of my real daddy to serve as suitable celebrity crush material—right down to the name. Like Pascal, my father Pedro also immigrated to the United States from Chile. And if Dad were still alive, Pascal’s stunning ascent would have thrilled him.

My dad considered his name Pedro so boring he adopted his middle as his first, Raúl, which he thought had more flair. He eventually reverted to Pedro for official business in old age, to access Social Security and Medicare benefits. We laughed whenever medical offices called for Pedro: “Pedro who?” Oh, that’s me, he chuckled. I smile imagining Dad taking newfound pride in his given name. Like Dad, Pascal’s also a chameleon who changed his name, taking his deceased mother’s surname in tribute. He Americanized his stage name for a year to Alexander before returning to Pedro, like many immigrants forced to hone their talents for adaptation as strangers in a new land.

The universe finally rewarded our decades of patience and delivered the mega star we’d always longed for. As a member of a minority within a minority, I always considered myself a niche flavor with a cult following at best. That one of us Chilenos could have such wide Hollywood appeal floors me, especially as recent studies find fewer BIPOC actors in leading roles. Come here, Daddy.

Mining Pascal’s biography has strengthened my connection to my deceased father at a time when Chile’s brutal history of dictatorship, U.S. intervention in Latin America, and the echoes of political suppression haunt me now at home in the U.S. The recent victory of far-right President-elect José Antonio Kast, an admirer of former dictator Augusto Pinochet suggests collective amnesia about the horrors that followed the 1973 military coup in Chile that overthrew democratically elected Socialist president Salvador Allende. Those who seized power suspended all political activities, usurped the media, disappeared, tortured, and killed thousands including beloved folk singer Víctor Jara, often called South America’s “Bob Dylan,” demonstrating a special zeal for persecuting artists and intellectuals.

Pascal has spoken openly about his family’s exile from Chile, “I wouldn’t say my parents were revolutionaries by any stretch of the imagination, but they were young, liberal college students.” After his physician father treated a gunshot victim wounded by Pinochet’s forces, his parents went into hiding and took refuge with him as a baby in Denmark and later the U.S.

In a 2016 interview with Stephen Colbert, Pedro offers a master class in charm disarmament, disclosing his leftist political leanings: “I am a child of political Socialist refugees. We are very, very liberal.” Describing his training at the DEA to prep for “Narcos,” he continues, “I don’t want to accuse them of being Conservative,” and confesses some nervousness with a smile and a wink, “Like I’m gonna get caught for my thoughts/ Every drug they talk about I can only think about doing it…,” inviting the audience to share in his complicity.

Pascal has long defended different groups under attack, notably trans and immigrant communities. Standing up against one of the world’s biggest bullies, President Donald Trump, Pascal joined nearly 7 million Americans at October’s No Kings protests, holding a sign that read, “No kings, only queens.” Since then he’s amplified “Ice Out” and condemned Alex Pretti’s murder. “Listen, I want to protect the people I love. But it goes beyond that. Bullies make me fucking sick,” he told Vanity Fair in his capacity as a decent human being and older brother of sister, Lux Pascal, a trans model and actor.

I’m relieved Dad’s not alive to witness ICE’s reign of terror. Through marriage to my mother, he obtained his Green Card but never became a U.S. citizen.  He was deeply rattled by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric during his first term, having suffered the pain of his friend’s suicide after Danny’s deportation to Chile years before.

Pedro has gifted me with an unexpected portal to the past, helping me practice talking to the dead. Five years after Dad died, I still miss his long-winded updates about Chilean minutiae, slightly maddening in their urgency, more endearing now in his absence. He’d call daily to chronicle every goal any Chilean fútbol player made anywhere that day. Now I find myself carrying on our conversations, telling Dad some biographical Pedro factoid, anticipating his funny responses to some Internet gossip. It’s my way of keeping Dad alive without realizing it, safe in the cocoon of memory where ICE nor anyone else can hurt him.

Until Trump 2.0’s war on science and academia, as a professor on a health sciences campus, I didn’t realize how much I also needed a superhero. Between growing uncertainty about unfettered artificial intelligence and its power to upend higher education, perpetual cuts to federal research funding, and attacks on free speech and DEI, I’m heartened by Pascal’s portrayal of Mister Fantastic, a role he’ll reprise in two upcoming Avengers films. In the current climate, playing Dr. Reed Richards, a brainiac scientist with superpower intelligence and shapeshifting stretching abilities, borders on a brave and risky artistic choice. I’ll take whatever inspiration I can get, reminded of my own capacity for nimbleness and elasticity to respond to whatever challenges loom on the horizon.

I’m forever grateful to Pedro for demonstrating that true power can exist without bullying and heroism lies in quiet strength. But as much as I’ll momentarily escape into the diversion of Pedro-mania whenever I need a boost, his true gift is showing those of us who belong to communities facing marginalization and violence that we already possess a vast reserve of superpowers to survive, thrive, and reinvent ourselves in this current political moment. Turns out I’m my own best hero, nurtured by a resourceful, shapeshifting immigrant father who’s given me everything I need.