Scarier than The Last of Us? What Pedro Pascal revealed about joining Fantastic Four: First Steps

Pedro Pascal. A man who walked across deserts with a green child in his arms. Who survived the fungal end of the world. Who had his skull crushed in one of the most brutal deaths in TV history. That man, Pedro Pascal, still felt fear. And not because of The Last of Us, The Mandalorian, or Game of Thrones. The fear, he says, came with Fantastic Four: First Steps.

"Each time you step into one, and you feel like this can't be scarier, you find out, ‘Oh, this is scarier.’"

He said it almost with a smirk, one that masks exhaustion, reverence, and the quiet tremble of someone who understands the scale of what he’s entering. Not just a superhero film. Not a mere reboot. Legacy.

Reed Richards is more than just the stretchy guy. He’s intellect turned into burden. A mind so sharp it borders on isolation. A scientist who touches godhood not through power, but through precision, and to embody that, to believably inhabit that, takes more than charisma. It takes surrender and Pedro Pascal knows it.

"They’re all scary because you really want to make people happy, especially if it’s something that’s widely known with particular expectations around it… You also want to be authentic to yourself so that it can be the best that it can be for anybody who wants to be entertained."

This isn’t just another MCU chapter. This is the spark of something deeper. If Pedro Pascal is scared, maybe we should be too. Because when he braces for impact, something big is coming. Reed Richards is coming. And this time, he’s bringing the fear with him.

The burden of legacy

Pedro Pascal has played warriors, fugitives, reluctant fathers, revolutionaries. He has worn armor, carried worlds on his shoulders, watched people he loved die in his arms. He has lived through Westeros, Colombia, Mandalore, and post-apocalyptic America. Yet none of it, according to him, compares to stepping into the shoes of Reed Richards.

"Stepping into something like Game of Thrones and then going into the early days of Netflix with Narcos and then Star Wars and the world of video games with The Last of Us, each time I’ve felt like I couldn’t top how intimidating the last one was."

This time, he did.

Reed Richards is not built on brute force or bravado. He does not lead with fire or fists. He does it with thought, vision and a silence that contains galaxies. And that, for an actor, is a terrifying frontier because there is nowhere to hide in stillness. No action sequence to mask a moment of hesitation. No alien to blame if the performance falls flat. Just intellect. Just gravity.

And the weight of decades pressing down.

This is Marvel’s First Family. The DNA of the entire universe. The origin point of cosmic ambition. Every step Pedro Pascal takes in this role echoes with what came before, the failed iterations, the unmet expectations, the pressure to finally get it right. To bring not just action but myth. Not just spectacle but soul.

In taking this on, Pascal is not just portraying a superhero. He is becoming a cornerstone. And the fear that comes with that is not weakness. It is reverence.

More than powers

Reed Richards does not explode into rooms. He does not snarl or rage or charm his way through conflict. He thinks, calculates and sees the shape of a problem before it forms. And that kind of power, abstract and internal, is harder to capture than any super strength or laser beam.

This is a man who can outthink gods and lose touch with humanity in the same breath. A man whose brilliance is his burden, whose elasticity is not just physical but emotional, stretching between his need for connection and his obsession with control. For an actor like Pedro Pascal, known for characters whose hearts bleed beneath the armor, Reed Richards demands a different kind of exposure. Not louder. Deeper.

The fear Pedro Pascal describes is not about disappointing Marvel or fumbling a reboot but standing at the edge of a mind that sees too much and feels too little. It is about learning to act with restraint and still reveal the storm beneath. And in that silence, in that discipline, there is nowhere to fake it.

You either are Reed Richards or you are not.

Chemistry and the cosmic family

Reed Richards may be the mind, but he is never meant to stand alone. The Fantastic Four are not a group of individuals. They are a constellation. A system of gravity, friction, fusion, and light. And the success of this film depends not only on who plays Reed, but on how well they orbit one another.

Pascal understands this. You can hear it in the way he speaks about his castmates. Vanessa Kirby. Joseph Quinn. Ebon Moss-Bachrach. These are not just co-stars. They are, as he puts it, the antidote to the fear.

"Then the kind of crown, top of the mountain feels like stepping into something like this… it can be the perfect antidote to the fear and to the pressure… You wrap yourself around that."

There is something almost alchemical about this ensemble. Kirby brings poise and depth, an emotional intelligence that can hold Reed accountable. Quinn, with his fire and youth, is chaos in motion, a Johnny Storm who burns through pretense. And Moss-Bachrach, already a master of wounded humanity, gives Ben Grimm a soul carved in stone.

Together, they are not just a team. They are a mythology in motion.

Marvel seems to know this too. This is a choreography of trauma, trust, tension, and love. And Pedro Pascal, as Reed, must be both the axis and the fracture. The one who holds it all together, and the one most likely to unravel.

If it works, it will not be because of CGI or spectacle. It will be because of chemistry. Because of something deeply human vibrating between the lines.

Scarier than zombies and galactic wars?

It almost sounds absurd. That this could be the scariest thing Pedro Pascal has ever done. After all, he has already faced the infected in The Last of Us, battled imperial warlords in The Mandalorian, and endured one of the most horrific deaths ever televised in Game of Thrones. Fear, by now, should be muscle memory.

But it is not.

This fear is different. It is not about violence. It is about expectation. About stepping into a story that people have already written in their hearts. About becoming something they already believe they know.

"Each time I’ve felt like I couldn’t top how intimidating the last one was."

And then Fantastic Four happened.

There is no apocalypse to blame here. No zombies to distract us. No outer galaxy to hide in. This is a story built on character, relationships and emotion so stripped of spectacle that it leaves the actor exposed. Pedro Pascal is stepping into a symbol. The mind that could either save the world or shatter it.

And maybe that is the scariest part. Not the power, but the precision it demands. He is not afraid of failing the studio. He is afraid of failing the myth.

Brace yourselves: Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards is coming

There are roles that test your range. There are roles that challenge your body. And then there are roles that demand your soul.

For Pedro Pascal, Reed Richards seems to be more than a performance: a transformation. Not into a superhero, but into an idea. A man who sees everything and still does not always understand himself. A mind vast enough to reshape universes, and yet too fragile to hold a marriage together.

That contradiction is where the real danger lies. Not in the enemies Reed will face, but in the silence he carries with him.

Pedro Pascal is no stranger to pain, to loss, to playing men shaped by trauma. But Reed is different. Reed is what happens when intellect outweighs instinct. When the desire to fix everything becomes a curse. And that is why this film, more than any other in Pascal’s career, feels like a reckoning.

It may not be the flashiest chapter in the MCU. It may not be the loudest. But it could be the one that leaves the deepest mark. The one that trades noise for nuance, and spectacle for scars.

Reed Richards is coming. And if Pedro Pascal is right, we should not just be excited.

We should be ready.