Highlights
- Pedro Pascal called learning the cello for Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth! the hardest thing he has ever had to learn to do.
- At the London premiere, he joked he would rather fight The Mountain from Game of Thrones than learn the cello again.
- Both Pascal and Gilroy had early doubts, but Variety’s critic says it really is Pascal playing in the Dec. 4 release.
Pedro Pascal has survived Westeros, a gladiator arena and a harness rig. A cello nearly finished him off.
The 51-year-old told Vanity Fair that mastering the instrument for Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth! was “literally the hardest, hardest, hardest thing I’ve ever had to learn to do.”
Three “hardests.” From a guy who’s done Westeros, that isn’t modesty, it’s a distress signal.
Pascal plays Alex, a world-renowned cellist who comes back to Los Angeles after two decades of touring and gets pulled into the invisible machinery of Hollywood film scoring.
He took over the lead after Oscar Isaac exited the project in August 2025. That meant a crash course in an instrument his character has known his whole life.
“Holding a bow correctly alone takes a day’s lesson, and that’s moving fast,” he said.
Then came the actual music. Pascal ranked the arena and the harness work below the job of “making it look convincing as you’re doing Tchaikovsky.”
He reportedly spent hours after each day’s filming getting comfortable with the thing.
By the Behemoth! premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 13, the trauma had matured into a bit.
He joked, “I would choose fighting The Mountain in Game of Thrones over learning how to play the cello convincingly. I would rather be, I don’t know, tossed off a cliff with Nicolas Cage than have to learn how to play the cello.”
The fear was real. “I’d never been so afraid,” he said, adding that the physical and emotional demands of past jobs were nothing like this.
Here’s the twist: he almost didn’t take the gig. Before meeting Gilroy, part of Pascal hoped something would go wrong so he could back out, thinking, “Maybe there’s an exit somehow.”
Gilroy had his own doubts. “I thought he was going to be somehow superficial or flighty,” the director admitted. Oof.
The two connected within an hour of meeting. Gilroy now credits Pascal’s performance with giving the film its “effervescence.”
It helps that Pascal is a nerd about this stuff. He took piano lessons as a kid and will pick movies based on the composer alone, with a soft spot for John Williams and Thomas Newman.
No wonder he calls the role “stepping into the thing that I always wanted.”
And once the panic passed, the payoff arrived. “Once I held the cello, I felt good,” he said.
The receipts are in. Variety‘s critic, who grew up a classical musician, says it really is Pascal playing, while The Daily Beast‘s Nick Schager calls it the most nuanced and soulful work of Pascal’s career.
Gilroy didn’t skimp on the soundtrack either. He hired nine composers, including Michael Giacchino, James Newton Howard and Alan Silvestri, to score the fake films inside Behemoth!
Pascal’s pitch is simple. “It’s a love letter to music; it’s a love letter to movies,” he told Variety.
Behemoth! hits theaters Dec. 4, with Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor, and Will Arnett also in the cast. Somewhere, a cello teacher deserves a producer credit.
