José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal (Spanish pronunciation: ; born 2 April 1975) is a Chilean-born American actor. After nearly two decades of taking small roles in film and television, Pascal rose to prominence for portraying Oberyn Martell during the fourth season of the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones (2014) and Javier Peña in the Netflix crime series Narcos (2015–2017). Since 2019, he has starred as the title character in the Disney Star Wars series The Mandalorian and again in The Book of Boba Fett (2022). Since 2023, he has played Joel in the HBO drama series The Last of Us.

Outside of television, Pascal has appeared in the films The Adjustment Bureau (2011), The Great Wall (2016), Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017), The Equalizer 2 (2018), Triple Frontier (2019), Wonder Woman 1984 (2020), and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022).

Early life
See also: Allende family and Balmaceda family
José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal was born in Santiago, Chile on 2 April 1975, the son of child psychologist Verónica Pascal Ureta and fertility doctor José Balmaceda Riera. He has an older sister named Javiera, a younger brother named Nicolás, and a younger sister named Lux, who is an actress and transgender activist. His mother was the cousin of Andrés Pascal Allende, the nephew of socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende (through his sister Laura). Andrés was an early leader of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, an urban guerrilla movement dedicated to the overthrow of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

According to Pascal, his parents were devout followers of Allende and active in resistance groups against the Pinochet dictatorship. Because of this, nine months after his birth, his family sought refuge in the Venezuelan embassy in Santiago, and were later granted political asylum in Denmark. The family ultimately moved to the United States, where Pascal was raised in Orange County, California and San Antonio, Texas. By the time he was eight, his family was able to take regular trips back to Chile to visit his 34 cousins.

Pascal was involved in competitive swimming during his early years and took part in the state championships in Texas at the age of 11, but stopped swimming competitively after getting into drama class. He studied acting at the Orange County School of the Arts, graduating in 1993 before moving on to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he graduated in 1997. His father was indicted by a federal grand jury in 1995 in relation to events at a fertility clinic he ran with two other men. His father, mother, and two youngest siblings thus returned to Chile; Pascal contends that his father did nothing wrong. His mother died by suicide in 1999. Following her death, he began using her surname professionally, both in honor of her and because he said Americans had difficulty pronouncing the surname Balmaceda.