Halina Reijn: Hello, I'm Halina Reijn.
Pedro Pascal: And I am Pedro Pascal.
Halina Reijn: And this is the A24 podcast.
Pedro Pascal: I like how you say podcast.
Halina Reijn: I try to do it that way where they get horny with how we speak into the mic.
Pedro Pascal: What is that, when you speak into the- what do you call it? ASMR. ASMR podcast. What were we supposed to talk about? We were supposed to say, how did we meet?
Halina Reijn: How did we meet?
Pedro Pascal: You would assume that we would-
Halina Reijn: I remember very well how we met. We met in the tower, right?
Pedro Pascal: No, I think we should tell them the true story.
Halina Reijn: What is the true story? Oh my God!
Pedro Pascal: You were walking down the street, a very busy street in New York, and this huge dog got loose, and then suddenly this man stepped in and just tamed the dog.
Halina Reijn: It almost killed me, the dog.
Pedro Pascal: And then we met.
Halina Reijn: You saved me.
Pedro Pascal: We are starting this off right. Where are you?
Halina Reijn: I just arrived in Amsterdam.
Pedro Pascal: You're kidding.
Halina Reijn: Yeah, I just arrived, this is my house in Amsterdam. I'm here because the Netherlands decided to give me some award, which I'm of course very grateful for, but it's also a good reason to fly back and see my family. So I'm really happy to be here.
Pedro Pascal: Did you really land today?
Halina Reijn: Yeah.
Pedro Pascal: So what time?
Halina Reijn: This morning.
Pedro Pascal: What time is it?
Halina Reijn: But I slept, or I napped. So I arrived at 6:30 Dutch time this morning, Amsterdam time, and then I napped for a couple of hours. So now I'm fully awake because now I'm kind of still on the American clock in my mind.
Pedro Pascal: Only to insist that this be the most boring beginning of any podcast conversation in the history of podcast conversations. What time was your flight? I'm obsessed with travel and sleep schedules.
Halina Reijn: No, I don't think people find that boring. I have the same thing. So my flight was at 4:30 New York time in the afternoon, and it was a six-hour flight.
Pedro Pascal: Ok so then just to work this out of my system then. So your flight was at 4:30?
Halina Reijn: 4:30, I arrived at 6:30 in the morning. And then you have a service here that is amazing, where they take you out of the plane in a little car and they kind of escort you out.
Pedro Pascal: But you slept on the plane?
Halina Reijn: I did not sleep at all.
Pedro Pascal: So you landed and then you had a nap in your own home?
Halina Reijn: Big nap, yes. In my home, in my own little bed.
Pedro Pascal: Okay.
Halina Reijn: And that's how I do it. So I kind of surrender to the fact that I cannot sleep on this specific flight to Amsterdam, I can never sleep. I just watch movies. I watched The Social Network, which I actually enjoyed, for the 600th time.
Pedro Pascal: Yeah. Wow.
Halina Reijn: It's good.
Pedro Pascal: And it's long too, so it'll take up a-
Halina Reijn: That's what I thought.
Pedro Pascal: I always download long movies that I love too!
Halina Reijn: This one will take me further than- and then I took a good nap. But I'm also obsessed. I think when you get older, you learn more to anticipate all your habits, and your fears, and your annoyances, and your frustrations, and then you can kind of take care of yourself a little better. So I always plan, like when I arrive, I plan that I have a whole… That I can nap in the daytime and I don't see anybody. And then I feel better now, and then hopefully I can sleep tonight. That will be the question.
Pedro Pascal: Travel definitely highlights our dependencies in a huge way for me.
Halina Reijn: Completely. For me, same. Because I think if you're a creature of habit, it's just hard to give up control. And of course in our lives, you have to travel a lot and you're almost never home, right?
Pedro Pascal: Yeah.
Halina Reijn: Almost never. So you have to be so adaptable. It's hard, no? Do you find that hard?
Pedro Pascal: I find the anticipation of it, I find it harder and harder. And then of course, because it's so habitual and the more familiar thing to my adult life, and even circumstantially, my upbringing, my body is just completely familiar. No matter what story I create in my mind in terms of this change that is coming towards me, it's far more familiar to me than staying in one place.
Halina Reijn: You moved a lot, right? Yeah.
Pedro Pascal: We moved a lot, yeah.
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: In the instances where we have had to either shelter in place or our industry was paralyzed by a double strike, etc., I found I wasn't uncomfortable not working.
Halina Reijn: I get it, I get it.
Pedro Pascal: I am a little, I can be lazy.
Halina Reijn: Me too. Same.
Pedro Pascal: But I definitely was like, oh, or I don't know, maybe every time the question of nesting comes up, I don't know how to answer it, I realize more and more that I'm not comfortable with... I feel like I have always sort of judged myself as immature because I am not nesting in one place and building a habitual environment in one place. And I learned that I'm just not comfortable with that, which makes perfect sense in terms of what I'm used to.
Halina Reijn: What your history is.
Pedro Pascal: Yeah.
Halina Reijn: Yes. No, absolutely. And did you then at a certain moment, start to embrace that and be like, instead of resisting that and thinking that you have to lead a certain life, do you now feel comfortable with that? That that's just a fact?
Pedro Pascal: I feel comfortable with it because when we all had to shelter in place during the early months of the pandemic, it became so clear to me. And also I think just in terms of political temperatures and what I can tolerate and what I can and cannot tolerate psychologically, I want to be on the move.
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: And I want to talk about Babygirl. How are we supposed to pivot? How are we supposed to pivot to... It isn't a big pivot, actually, because I remember getting to see you very soon after I'd seen the movie, and I was such a raw nerve when I saw it. I've also been listening to conversations because I want to be as polished as I can to talk to you about it. And I've been really curious also about the kinds of conversations that you've been having, either with audience members or with other journalists and with other filmmakers. And I was particularly moved by the idea that I think in North American films, for the most part, there's such a moral landscape to movies, right?
Halina Reijn: Mm-hmm.
Pedro Pascal: And that if there are potentially perilous circumstances, then the characters need to be punished.
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: Or there's a binary idea of what is heroic and what is villainous, and it creates a very specific kind of structured catharsis. And I mean, I literally cried to you because one, seeing your movie as an actor, but also seeing it from a storytelling point of view. There was one part seeing how a writer and director treated their characters with so much love, frankly. And then the kinds of performances that were available to us from Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, everyone in the movie had to come from such a special care from their leader. And I don't know, talk about that.
Halina Reijn: Yeah, no. Thank you. I didn't want to interrupt you. So first of all, I want to say that when you had an emotional reaction, that was so meaningful to me because the movie works on, I think for different people on different levels. Some people just find it entertaining and hot and think, "Oh, it's just"-
Pedro Pascal: Well, I mean, it is.
Halina Reijn: And hopefully it is. And other people find it funny, and hopefully it is, and all of that. But for me personally, of course, this movie is so incredibly vulnerable, and so full of shame still. And so there are so many secrets underneath it also that you might not see, or not everybody sees them, and they don't have to at all. You can still very much enjoy it without unpacking every wound that is underneath the story. But I felt that you, without even speaking, when we were just cuddling, how do you say that? Embracing each other. I just felt that very strong connection. I've had that like five times or six times where I really felt that certain people really saw it at its darkest, you know? Also at the other level also.
Pedro Pascal: And its most innocent.
Halina Reijn: Yes. That is something that you said so well, that I thought was really beautiful.
Pedro Pascal: I found it to be-
Halina Reijn: That it was pure. Yeah.
Pedro Pascal: So pure. I found it incredibly hot. I found it incredibly sort of tense, and thrilling, and funny. You could argue if it's a comedy, you could argue if it's a drama, you can argue if it's a thriller.
Halina Reijn: Yeah.
Pedro Pascal: And really it's all of those things, which that's the kind of variety that life can actually provide. And in the end, for me, it was like a healing montage basically for the characters to kind of take these tropes, these taboo subjects, power dynamics or the limited ideas that can control relationships between men and women.
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: Love, growing, expectation. I mean, it's endless, really.
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: And so then to use these, as we call them, kind of tropes from erotic thrillers that we grew up watching that we love.
Halina Reijn: Yes, yes. Loved.
Pedro Pascal: And actually use them as doorways to vulnerability.
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: And I honestly... And there's a part of me that feels a little frustrated by how hard it is for people to process something that's so kind of more whole. This is "gender swap," or “ we're deconstructing the idea of Me Too" or these kinds of limited... I mean, ultimately everyone is enjoying the shit out of this movie as they should be, and it's doing very well.
Halina Reijn: Yeah, it is.
Pedro Pascal: And I'm wearing a Babygirl sweatshirt right now.
Halina Reijn: Yes. That looks so good on you.
Pedro Pascal: Thank you very much. But I wonder what that is, that people are kind of challenged by the movie.
Halina Reijn: Yeah.
Pedro Pascal: And I don't see the intention to challenge an audience or to provoke an audience rather than put the characters in challenging circumstances and experience those challenges in the most truthful, human way.
Halina Reijn: Yes, and everything you're saying is exactly what’s also on my mind about the movie. And of course, I mean, if I look at where I started, when I started writing and where we are now, of course I'm super grateful, and I'm celebrating, and I'm so full of joy. But I do notice that even though I of course made this from a place of warmth, like you said, and healing, and a place of radical honesty, I'm sometimes taken aback. And that's of course exactly why I wanted to make the film. People are very drawn to it. They all want to sort of see it, and then some people find it scary in a way that I don't say, "This is good and that is bad." And still people really want to be taken by the hand and guided towards good and evil.
And apparently we are still very much fighting with ourselves in that sense, because we're all ambiguous beings. We're all light and dark, and we all have an enormous amount of beautiful thoughts and an enormous amount of extremely dark thoughts in our head and in our souls. And if we don't come to terms with that, that's for me, where the real danger lies. And I think art, whatever, that's a crazy pretentious word-
Pedro Pascal: I love the word. I love the word art.
Halina Reijn: Storytelling.
Pedro Pascal: Art, art, art.
Halina Reijn: Art, art, art. But I think us who are in a creative space, whether we are writers, or actors, or whatever we are, but I think there is a task to try to at least address these things and not provide judgment. Because I think what we were just talking about, about nesting and about all these things, I have always felt a lot of pain in my life that I didn't walk the walk that I was supposed to walk or, you know, at a certain age I should have had a relationship, I should have had children. I really wanted all of that, it just didn't happen to me. And again, these are maybe first world problems, but I think all of us suffer from this idea. Nicole Kidman says it in the middle of the movie to her husband, Antonio Banderas. She says, "I want to be normal. I want to be the person that you like. I want to be what you like."
And I think that's... And it doesn't matter whether we have children, whether we are nesting, not nesting, whatever, but we all feel that we're aliens, and we're imposters, and we're isolated, and we want connection. And sometimes what is hard for me to understand is that I think by being so honest about complexity, about ambiguity, that we can connect, and we can, a lot of people can, in an insanely emotional way with this movie, and fun way, a lot of people are watching it, but there's also a lot of resistance.
Pedro Pascal: Of course.
Halina Reijn: People just want clarity. And also from me, they are like, "But what is your... Are you a feminist?" Like of course I am. Did you see the film? And it's just very interesting. And then it's also interesting what it does to me, because then sometimes my ego comes-
Pedro Pascal: Of course.
Halina Reijn: I can be this holy creature saying, "Oh, I made this as a conversation starter," and I did, but then there's also a side of me that is like “But don't you see what I'm trying to do here?”
Pedro Pascal: I guess that's what's so challenging is the purity of intent, you know?
Halina Reijn: Yeah.
Pedro Pascal: And using such impure subject matter, which is what I think, whether that was very purposeful or not, or whether that kind of came about in an organic way, I don't know. But it is a silly question for me to ask like, what are people feeling challenged by? Everyone is challenged by honesty. None of us are used to, I mean, it breaks your heart because it's true. We are not really taught to be honest with ourselves, with people, because there's so much... Because you have to face your fears, and that sucks.
Halina Reijn: No, it's true. You have to face your fears. You're right. And the ultimate honesty, of course, is death, right?
Pedro Pascal: Yeah.
Halina Reijn: I mean, we're all going to die. And then it's very-
Pedro Pascal: And what will die is what we're holding onto, these dependencies, and these stories, and how to keep these ideas of how to keep ourselves safe. How to keep a marriage safe, how to keep a job safe. We grip them at the expense of anything, sometimes.
Halina Reijn: Anything. And we prefer safety over freedom.
Pedro Pascal: Or some idea of safety.
Halina Reijn: Yes. And of course, life is incredibly unpredictable. We have experienced that in the past weeks in our little micro world of Los Angeles and New York. But life is chaos, and death is chaos, because it can present itself at any time. And I think therefore, yeah, like you said, we prefer to see it as a cartoon.
We prefer to see it... And we want movies to present to us a world that might talk about these kinds of subjects. But then in the end, we want to be led by the filmmaker towards what our opinion should be. And when the filmmaker doesn't do that and says, "No, that's up to you.” Like, I don't know. Of course, yeah, she had sex with her intern. That is wrong to begin with, of course. But it's up to you. I'm not going to punish this woman. I'm just going to let you decide, and feel, and use your own imagination to create your own opinion if you want to have one, or just to feel something. I just don't want to be a moralist. I just refuse it because I feel that anything that does do that for me, when I watch that, then I feel completely left out. So those sexual killers in the 90s. I love them until the end, until the final act. Then I always felt, wait, this is not about me at all.
So for me, this is the best way to connect. But for a lot of people, they shy away from that. And that is also what I feel in daily life. When I turned 35 and I still didn't have the normal life, I felt that other people instinctively had an issue with it, even if they were very smart. It just feels like one little animal is walking away from the flock from the bigger group. And I think life scales, and we just want clarity. And on the other hand, if you dare to open yourself up to something like this, it's super exciting.
Art is not a place to only show characters that make the right choices. Shakespeare could have ever had, you know, who's Macbeth in that? Who's Richard III in that? It makes no sense to want… Some people say, "But she shouldn't have done that, and the movie has to make that clear." The movie does make that clear, but it's still human, you know? It's still very human.
Pedro Pascal: The first instant that I felt her loneliness was when Antonio Banderas' character was talking about Hedda Gabler, and he says, "This is about"-
Halina Reijn: Yeah, he says that-
Pedro Pascal: "Suicide?"
Halina Reijn: “His actress doesn't understand, yeah." He says, "My actress who plays Hedda Gabler doesn't understand. She thinks the play is about desire, but the plays is about suicide."
Pedro Pascal: Yeah, and I immediately was like, no.
Halina Reijn: Yeah, exactly.
Pedro Pascal: It's about desire!
Halina Reijn: Desire. Yeah, exactly. Yes.
Pedro Pascal: And that was the first ingredient of her experience where I started to kind of identify the isolated which, and I don't mean to judge him, because he has such a gorgeous journey that he goes on as well. And I think understanding Hedda Gabler in only one way was sort of the start of his journey.
Halina Reijn: Yeah. Yes. What I really love about how we created that character, and also how Antonio performs it, is that he seems to be incredibly warm and open, and he's creative, and he doesn't have any issue with her powerful job, and he kind of feels like the ideal man.
Pedro Pascal: Yeah.
Halina Reijn: He's strong, he's hot. But they don't really communicate.
Pedro Pascal: Yeah.
Halina Reijn: No, but it's in this very subtle way, and I think that is so relatable, and Nicole and Antonio both did such an amazing job creating that kind of vibe, that kind of dynamic that was incredibly loving and warm. But at the same time, the subtle miscommunication, the subtle isolation of being in a very long relationship, but not truly daring to be yourself, and then being more yourself with a complete stranger, which is of course always so interesting about intimacy.
Pedro Pascal: Oh, it's so much easier.
Halina Reijn: Yeah, to be reborn with someone you don't know, right?
Pedro Pascal: Yeah.
Halina Reijn: Yeah. A blank canvas.
Pedro Pascal: Intimacy, I think ultimately, whether people are willing to admit it or not is probably the scariest thing for all of us. Like real intimacy. I wouldn't even say I understand. And as I said, I'm your elder.
Halina Reijn: By seconds, but yes, okay.
Pedro Pascal: I can't say it's something that I even totally understand or feel realized in and everything. So that's why I was so moved when I saw you, because one, I love you.
Halina Reijn: I love you.
Pedro Pascal: And so I was really celebrating a friend. And then independent of knowing you, I would've had this experience with the movie that I found, in simple terms, very, very entertaining, beautiful looking and gorgeously performed, but also really therapeutic. And that moved me. I love movies more than I love anything, and have since I was a kid. And so the hunger that I can feel, sometimes at a certain point that I am not even aware of, because I have had such an incredible opportunity to be on so many sets for the last several years. I still return to what my origin story is, which is going to the movies.
Halina Reijn: Right. That's so great though. Do you remember your first movie, or one of the first that you ever saw?
Pedro Pascal: There's a collage of firsts. There's Watership Down, which I remember was traumatizing because my dad was taking us to see what he thought was an animated movie about rabbits and the whole thing starts with a field turning into blood, and then the rabbits are ripping each other apart.
Halina Reijn: It's so extreme.
Pedro Pascal: It's so violent. I also remember Xanadu, and that probably was the first movie where I started to kind of, I think, participate by myself in the theater where I started to kind of... I was so fascinated by the women coming out of the mural in Venice Beach. And then I started to, I think, talk to the movie. I remember Superman, except I went to the bathroom.
Halina Reijn: Why? You just had to go to the bathroom and you missed-
Pedro Pascal: Yeah, I went to pee, and I didn't know how to read yet. So I couldn't find my way back to Superman, and I think I went into an Al Pacino movie that I... I thought that I went into Kramer vs. Kramer, but I realize now, I was like, no, it was definitely Al Pacino, and he was walking down the steps of city hall. So it was this movie called …And Justice For All. And I just went in there and I was lost. And then of course, you go into some sort of paralyzed mode, and I just sat down and I think in my fear, I fell asleep. And I remember just waking up with my parents and a custodian of the movie theater standing over me, and we were leaving-
Halina Reijn: Oh, no.
Pedro Pascal: And then we were leaving the theater, so I missed the end of Superman.
Halina Reijn: That is so funny.
Pedro Pascal: And then my older sister was teasing me, telling me, "And then this happened, and there was an earthquake. And then Lois Lane, and Superman makes the world spin backwards." And I told her that it happened in my movie too. That the same thing happened in the Al Pacino movie. I was like, "Yeah, and the same thing happened in mine."
Halina Reijn: Oh my God, that is so cute. And did you ever go to the theater as a child or not?
Pedro Pascal: I started to go to the theater, I think about... My parents were so young when they had us, and they did such a great job. They were a mess. But they did such a great job because they, as part of, I guess, sort of brought us into their experience. But once my mother understood as a kid, I was a swimmer, and then I pivoted to, they let me get into theater, whatever she could find to get me out of the house in the summer, starting at the age of 12. And then by the time I was 14, I got into a performing arts program for high school that my mother found, and they got season tickets to South Coast Repertory, because we were living in Orange County at the time. And I saw this play called Search and Destroy by Howard Korder, which funnily enough is a very aggressive take on our industry, but from the late 80s, getting a movie made by any means necessary, and this predates Altman's The Player.
Halina Reijn: Right.
Pedro Pascal: And how I felt about Watership Down and Xanadu was how I felt about this play when I saw it. It was actually the world premiere of the play, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
Halina Reijn: And did it scare you for your future, because you knew you wanted to be an actor at that point?
Pedro Pascal: No. Later as a child, it was always the fantasy. I was hearing you... No, no. I think I read something that said that you saw Annie when you were a kid.
Halina Reijn: Yeah.
Pedro Pascal: And you felt jealous of the girl, and that was when you understood that you wanted to be on stage.
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: I had the same experience watching these children in Spielberg movies. I was like, I'm jealous of Elliot. I want to meet the alien.
Halina Reijn: 100%.
Pedro Pascal: You know?
Halina Reijn: No, I totally, I had the same thing with Drew Barrymore, with any kid, any child in any movie. I was like, "How did they get there?" Yeah, they're like prodigies. I said to my parents, "I want to be like a miracle child." I really wanted to be a child star.
Pedro Pascal: How the hell did it happen?
Halina Reijn: Yeah.
Pedro Pascal: Yes, me too.
Halina Reijn: It's so funny that kids feel that.
Pedro Pascal: I remember reading the stories that Steven Spielberg met Heather O'Rourke, who played Carol Anne in Poltergeist in a park. And I was like, "What park? What park do I"... Even, oh God. I was so obsessed with it, I started to lie. I remember trying to convince somebody that I was Christian Bale on the poster of Empire of the Sun.
Halina Reijn: That’s amazing. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, that's me. That's so cute.
Pedro Pascal: And then I told people that... Oh, speaking of our beloved David Lynch, I told everyone that I was going to be in Twin Peaks before it premiered on, I think, I don't know, ABC.
Halina Reijn: Oh, wow.
Pedro Pascal: And all those lies always caught up to me, by the way. They always caught up to me.
Halina Reijn: In a bad way?
Pedro Pascal: In a terrible way…
Halina Reijn: But Twin Peaks was such a huge thing back then, right? For our generation. We lived inside that thing.
Pedro Pascal: Oh, I was obsessed.
Halina Reijn: Everyone was watching because it was still network TV, of course. And it was all over the world. Everybody was watching it, and it formed, it shaped our brains and how we-
Pedro Pascal: Completely.
Halina Reijn: Thought about sexuality, and everything, and romance, and tension. I was so scared to watch it too, I was so frightened.
Pedro Pascal: Oh, it's terrifying. It's borderline horror.
Halina Reijn: It's borderline horror. And also because it goes so deep. It's so scary in kind of an existential way. When I would finish an episode, I would always be afraid that I would go into a psychosis because it was so crazy what he was creating, and so new at that time. It was really, really beautiful work. Oh my God, that show.
Pedro Pascal: Well, when did you start to get... Because you have a film career that hasn't even come close to catching up with your theater career. Did it just start in school?
Halina Reijn: Yeah, it started because we grew up really, really extreme. So we were not allowed to see TV or magazines or anything because we were-
Pedro Pascal: I was going to say, where did you find Twin Peaks and stuff?
Halina Reijn: Well, the thing was that our babysitter that we had, because my parents were both very centered and focused on their art, they were both artists, and they were basically making art all day, and we were not allowed to really talk to them.
And so we had this babysitter, and she was so bored because we didn't have any toys, only wooden blocks, because we were supposed to use our imagination. She took us to see Annie against... My parents would've never allowed it, and it did change us. It did completely change us, as they feared.
Pedro Pascal: Your parents were right.
Halina Reijn: They were right! But then my dad, he kind of understood that there was no way that he was going to prevent that I wanted to be a child star. And so he thought the best way to solve that was to build a theater in our garden for me so I could just make theater. So I started to do that, and then I just knew I was... But I really wanted to be famous too. I didn't want it in the way my parents were doing it. I thought that was stupid.
Pedro Pascal: You didn't want to be an artist, you wanted to be a star.
Halina Reijn: No, I wanted to be a star.
Pedro Pascal: Yeah, me too.
Halina Reijn: Yeah, right? Yeah. It really was both. And I wanted to just do it in a very traditional way. My parents were so, of course, now that I look back on it, I applaud them for their courage. But then I thought it was, so why would you make art if nobody is seeing it? Because they were these very radical painters and video artists. And then I just became obsessed and I started working when I was, I think 15 or something. And my dad died when I was 10. And when he died-
Pedro Pascal: I'm sorry.
Halina Reijn: Yeah. Suddenly, he had a lung embolism. And when he died, my mom turned out to be more normal than she sort of presented as. And then she bought a TV, and then we could watch Twin Peaks. So slowly-
Pedro Pascal: So she had sort of permission to kind of be who she-
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: Was, is.
Halina Reijn: Who she really was, and we got a little more influence of the outside world. And then when I was 18, I just went to theater school and then I played Ophelia which was my first role, and then my career took off. But I always had in the back of my mind, and I'm also fascinated too, because I know that you wrote a play. Honestly, I thought that the child who played Annie made the movie.
Pedro Pascal: Right, of course.
Halina Reijn: I really didn't understand, right?
Pedro Pascal: It's her world.
Halina Reijn: Yeah, it's her world.
Pedro Pascal: I thought the same thing when I saw the movie.
Halina Reijn: I never understood that actors didn't make the thing themselves. Only later did I understand, "Oh." And so I always was interested in all the other layers of it. And I think what my mistake was in my life, I was so hungry and I acted so much, and I did so much that it just was too much. I developed a very serious stage fright. So we were constantly touring the world because Ivo van Hove, the director I was working with, was discovered by Scott Rudin. And that made him so popular worldwide that we... So I would one week be in China playing this, and the next week in another continent playing another role. And it was all leading roles. Hedda Gabler, Nora in A Doll's House, The Taming of the Shrew, Mourning Becomes Electra, and on, and on, and on.
Pedro Pascal: Jesus.
Halina Reijn: And it was too much. It was too... And then I lost, I started to lose it.
Pedro Pascal: You were playing those parts simultaneously?
Halina Reijn: Yeah, simultaneously. And-
Pedro Pascal: And you're going to call it stage fright?
Halina Reijn: Yeah, that's true actually. That is true. It was wild. It was so wild. And at a certain moment, I did a play with Jude Law, Obsession, directed by, he came to join the company, which was amazing, and we did a play with him. And he was the one to kind of be like, "This is pretty nuts, what you're doing."
Pedro Pascal: Right, right.
Halina Reijn: And he really gave me the confidence-
Pedro Pascal: This is not like mentally sustainable.
Halina Reijn: No. And it takes an outsider, of course, because when you're in it, it is also amazing, right?
Pedro Pascal: Of course.
Halina Reijn: Because you see all these different cultures, and you're bringing art to places where it is unimaginable that you can bring the kind of theater that we were making. But it took an outsider for me to tell me that I could also be on my own and be creative. And that's when I started to write Instinct, my first movie in the wings and started to think, oh, maybe I should be a little more my own motor, and create my own stories.
Pedro Pascal: So what you're fucking telling me, basically, is that you were playing all of the greatest female characters in theater history all around the world. And in the midst of that, you wrote a fucking movie? I have wasted my life, the things I could have been doing sitting in my trailer on the fourth Law and Order production.
Halina Reijn: I did write that with other people. I didn't write that on my own. It was my escape. It was funny, if I look back, I still-
Pedro Pascal: It was almost like you were taking care of yourself. You were sort of feeding a thing that your mind, your heart, your soul needed.
Halina Reijn: Craved.
Pedro Pascal: Instead of serving something, you started to serve yourself.
Halina Reijn: Yes, exactly. And I think for us as actors, because I still consider myself an actor, even though I don't act anymore, but you have to be so aware of boundaries. And I'm not talking about physical and intimacy boundaries, I'm talking about spiritual boundaries. Because of course, we are kind of... To stay with your career, but we are kind of gladiators. We go into the ring, and there's a lion, and you give-
Pedro Pascal: Total-
Halina Reijn: Everything.
Pedro Pascal: Yeah, completely.
Halina Reijn: You give everything. You're an open wound.
Pedro Pascal: You give your body, literally, you give your body, and then everything that your body brings, which is your fucking mind, and your heart, and your thoughts, and your fears, and your ambitions, and everything. And there are so many different types of actors, you realize.
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: And that doesn't mean in terms of process, but in terms of the way their minds work. There are actors that are writers, even if they haven't written.
Halina Reijn: Yes, it's very true.
Pedro Pascal: And their real entryway is from a writer's point of view, and they write in the moment. I'm trying to kind of like, I'm still in my identity crisis because I've never felt that comfortable speaking from the character's point of view. I've never been comfortable with limiting the way I'm understanding a job from the point of view of a character, which I've always judged as a failure on my part as an actor, in a way.
Halina Reijn: Right, yes.
Pedro Pascal: And now that I'm getting older and these kinds of things that we build shame around just aren't good for our cortisol levels, basically.
Halina Reijn: It's true.
Pedro Pascal: You know what I mean?
Halina Reijn: It's true.
Pedro Pascal: Yeah, that's kind of the nice thing about aging is where you're just like, that kind of stress, it's not good for me, and it's making my face puffy. You know what I mean?
Halina Reijn: I agree.
Pedro Pascal: So I'm going to start letting this shit go. I'm more honest with myself where I do I think more producerial... I'm not thinking about the budget. So maybe more understanding what the director is after, and not what-
Halina Reijn: And what the whole film is, and not just-
Pedro Pascal: What the whole picture is. I need to, I think both need to be serviced. I love to still face the challenge of servicing the point of view of a character, but I know that what happens more naturally to my mind is the big picture, and how to place myself, and how to place myself in it, which makes me a very frustrated actor. Because I'm like "I don't agree."
Halina Reijn: Yeah, it is. I think as actors it's, to find the sort of balance between speaking up and speaking your mind and surrendering is a very interesting balancing act. And of course, I stayed with one director for hundreds of years because I trusted him.
Pedro Pascal: Is that Ivo?
Halina Reijn: Yeah. I couldn't function very well. Of course, I did movies to make money, to be honest with you, but I had a hard time because I felt I'm giving so much when I act. I just felt, I'm just literally giving... I'm a Scorpio, I'm a total control freak. So to give over to say, "Okay, here, Pedro, you can have my heart here. Do what, throw it around." And for me, because I'm that kind of actress, I just have to really trust you. I'm not holding back. I just go and give you everything.
And so I could only really do that with Ivo because I knew I trusted what he was making in the actual, like you said, I trusted the bigger picture. I trusted his message. I thought it was true art. And because he was very prepared and he created clarity, and within that clarity, I could completely let go. And that is something that I do for my actors. I try to do as well, where I created an incredibly thought through, well prepared construct. And within that construct, I created hopefully a space in which they can be dangerous and electrifying with each other without being unsafe.
Pedro Pascal: Safety and trust. Yeah.
Halina Reijn: Yeah, safety and trust. Safety and trust. Of course, intelligent actors, they crave more than to just get an assignment. They also need to know, what are we doing? What is this? What is the goal of this? What are we saying with this? What is the tone? What is it?
Pedro Pascal: How can I help author that? How can I help author the potential of what we're doing here?
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: You know?
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: Of course. But you're made to build so many different muscles just to kind of serve an assignment in a different way, because sometimes it's just not... You also have to, in some instances, you just adjust. Every single experience is different.
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: But I can completely understand. I have not had that experience of being able to work with one person that... I've had the amazing experience of different people providing different experiences, for sure. But to be somebody's sort of, I guess, I don't know, to kind of have a muse relationship, I suppose, with someone. And then to break out into your own authorship of storytelling, which had to have been there from the beginning, and your journey from wanting to be a star to working with the highest form of theater art as we understand it in our generation, to telling your own stories. It's like in a crazy way, not to use the tragedy of losing your father so young, but one of the doorways that kind of opened so that you get to step into the person that you've always been?
Halina Reijn: Yeah, beautifully said.
Pedro Pascal: You know?
Halina Reijn: Yeah, no, totally. And I think that losing my father, I definitely think that that made me the kind of ideal muse, because I was craving a father so much.
Pedro Pascal: You were looking for a father, of course.
Halina Reijn: And I had no issue, also, with having that position, therefore.
Pedro Pascal: Of course, yeah.
Halina Reijn: It felt very incredible to me.
Pedro Pascal: Because that needed to be fed.
Halina Reijn: Yeah.
Pedro Pascal: Of course.
Halina Reijn: To have that kind of safety and someone who is so clear as Ivo was for me, that was amazing. But then to become your own father, you have to become a father of yourself, and to yourself, and to others.
Pedro Pascal: And as a director and writer you're the parent.
Halina Reijn: Parents, yeah.
Pedro Pascal: You're all roles, but ultimately the parent of an entire cast and a crew.
Halina Reijn: Yeah, that is an interesting transition, especially because my acting career was... Look, you can also be an actor that creates their own theater group, or especially in Europe, there's all sorts of forms of acting. But my acting was incredibly traditional. I was really part of a huge company that traveled the world. You were told what to do, you heard, "You're going to do this, this, this." And I wanted that. I cultivated that very, very much.
So to go from that to then having to tell other people what to do on a set felt like a big leap. But I think for me, what my drive also is that I want to be the director in movies that I never had. And I really want to just create space for the talent of others that when I write, I'm of course just writing also the most juicy parts for the actors that I would want to play. It's all about, my movie you could also almost see in some ways as a therapeutic exercise.
That's how, I mean, for me, that's literally what I'm trying to do to create these safe spaces with these characters in which they almost do therapy with each other. But they're also actors exercises because there's all these shifts where they go in and out of their performance. The whole movie is, of course, about the idea that humans have, especially women, but that they have to perform different roles in life to be perfect, to be loved. And so we took that and directly created a tone out of that, which is that they constantly go in and out of their roles. They go, "Get on your knees." "Oh no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that." They constantly show that they're acting, breaking through the fourth wall. And that is so much fun for actors, because then they can tap into their full range. And it says something about life because we are performing, and what is it to be your authentic self? What does that even mean? Does that even exist? It's such an interesting existential question.
Pedro Pascal: Well, it's helping me understand so deeply why I reacted the way I did when I saw the movie, so I feel so much less crazy. I mean, I wrote you, I said, "I feel torn open." And it's helpful to understand because I think that the kind of environment that you're saying that you, all of the intention that you put into it, just as a writer, as a director, and as a leader of a group and an environment, I felt all of that in seeing it. And so nothing, I'm just glad I'm not going through some sort of, you know, that it's not a continuing extension of my midlife crisis where I see a friend make something beautiful and I can't get over it for days, and days, and days.
Halina Reijn: No. For me, that was the most beautiful reaction I could get.
Pedro Pascal: Can I just give a shout out to everyone in your movie?
Halina Reijn: Yes, please.
Pedro Pascal: To Nicole, to Antonio, to Harris, and how much I have been cramping his style as us Gen Xers, like to say, by trying to do his dance and just fanboying over his performance. Because I think that it is something that without him, it's almost like it relied on him being as good as he was for the entire thing to work in a way.
Halina Reijn: 100%.
Pedro Pascal: I mean, look… Nothing takes a fraction away from anyone, anything in that movie. Because Nicole, who I have seen, I saw dead... Okay. When I mentioned South Coast Repertory before, so that was the very first acting class I took in my life when I was 12 years old. It was like a kid's workshop, play theater, a day theater camp kind of thing. Right across the street was an Edwards movie theater in Costa Mesa, California. And sometimes my mother couldn't pick me up in time for when the class was over. And the gift was I would get to go across the street and watch a movie, and then she would come get me. And they didn't care what I saw. And I saw Dead Calm.
Halina Reijn: Wow.
Pedro Pascal: It was not rated R, it was PG-13, if I remember correctly, because I got the ticket myself. And I wasn't 13 years old, but they didn't, I don't know. They didn't give a shit. Or my mother got it for me before she dropped me off at the class so that I had the ticket for the later showing, and then she would come and pick me up, the whole thing. Anyway, so that's all to say, it's a very long way of telling you where I started with Nicole Kidman.
Halina Reijn: Yes. And how young you started.
Pedro Pascal: And how young I started.
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: And as a kid being like, who the fuck is that?
Halina Reijn: Yeah.
Pedro Pascal: Her in Babygirl is just, we can go into a whole hour of what it means, I think, for a woman of her talent and career to step into a role with so much vulnerability. But what's interesting is that it isn't new. It's not like, "Whoa, Nicole Kidman did this." No, this is what she's always been doing.
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: It's that the projects haven't been the same, but she's always been like, let's call it game, right?
Halina Reijn: Always, always.
Pedro Pascal: Open.
Halina Reijn: Open.
Pedro Pascal: And an athlete.
Halina Reijn: In the moment. Alive.
Pedro Pascal: As an artist. Like-
Halina Reijn: Raw, everything. Yes.
Pedro Pascal: Yeah, totally.
Halina Reijn: Yes, absolutely.
Pedro Pascal: So to see even, I don't know, to kind of see her in a circumstance as an artist, as an actor, to not be negotiating any limitations, it's an event.
Halina Reijn: Absolutely.
Pedro Pascal: And then for Antonio to kind of be just as virile as he's ever been in terms of a presence, like he just comes onto the screen and you're just like, he's so enrapturing to look at, to listen to, and then as an actor so grounded and then so vulnerable, is a wild card in and of itself. And then between the two is Harris, who's the young, hot guy, that ultimately none of it, with these perfect circumstances, it still might've not have worked had Harris not been as kind of convincing and complex and similarly of vulnerable.
Halina Reijn: Yes. And technically insanely talented. Someone who you can actually ask, like what we were talking about as far as acting a style and tone, and going in and out of your role, and going from dominant to extremely vulnerable, and also bringing yourself into it. Instead of thinking, I'm crawling into the skin of this other person, I of course love for actors to bring radical honesty to the performance, and bring them to their own hearts and soul. And he does that, and yeah, that is phenomenal. I agree with you. Because he is such a young man. The character is so young, and has to dominate her with his mind. I'm not talking physically, but it's a mind game. You have to bring that to do... And it's intimidating.
Pedro Pascal: To be the first person in the movie, the first character that understands it as a safe space.
Halina Reijn: Yes.
Pedro Pascal: And confused when actually you're insisting that these are real threats, when really this is the only opportunity that we have to explore ourselves in safety. And he's the messenger of that to me.
Halina Reijn: Yes. Yeah, he's almost-
Pedro Pascal: And that's very unexpected.
Halina Reijn: Yeah, and it's hard to do.
Pedro Pascal: He's so perplexed by like, he's like, I can't remember, but he says something like, "Why would you think I would do that? You think I'm going to ruin your marriage, that I would do that to you? I wouldn't do that to you. I’m threatening to do that to you, but I'm not going to do that to you." Unless I'm remembering the movie incorrectly.
Halina Reijn: No, no. But he does so well. Of course, the character is created, like you say, almost like an angel kind of figure, a fairy... Like how he's introduced is pure fairy tale, what we just talked about with the dog, and how... And he's of course everything. He has a dark side, he has a light side, he's sensitive, he takes his time. He is the therapist, if you will. So it's a mythological character. And to play that on such a human level, to make-
Pedro Pascal: To ground that, yeah.
Halina Reijn: It’s so real. To ground that, to anchor that, is incredible. It's incredible. And to make it so funny, because that is-
Pedro Pascal: So funny, so funny.
Halina Reijn: Or something so darkly, so funny.
Pedro Pascal: I saw it with a friend, and I'm not going to call her out, but I saw it with a friend, and the first instant that he said, "Shut the door," she literally yelped/squealed/some sort of human sound that came out of her. And let's end it on that.
Halina Reijn: Let's end it on that. The human sound that came out of her. And also your dance. Can I just say thank you publicly? Because everybody, all my male friends, some of my exes have called me and asked me, "How does he dance like that?" Not about Harris, but about you. About you!
Pedro Pascal: That was performance art. Halina, when do you come back from Amsterdam?
Halina Reijn: So I tend to stay a week, and then I’ll go to New York, and then I’ll come to LA.
Pedro Pascal: When?
Halina Reijn: I'm not sure. Soon. February, where will you be?
Pedro Pascal: I will be here waiting for you.
Halina Reijn: As you should. To stay in the movie. As you should.
Pedro Pascal: Yes, exactly.
Halina Reijn: Thank you Pedro, I love you so much.
Pedro Pascal: Love you a lot.
Halina Reijn: Bye-Bye.