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Everyone's favorite daddy Pedro Pascal was almost cast in the gay show 'Looking'
We would’ve loved to have seen this version of the HBO series!
Looking, HBO's groundbreaking series centered around the lives of gay men, debuted 10 years ago. And yet, we're still learning more about the show — including which “Hot Internet Daddy” almost scored a role on the show.
The show followed the trials and tribulations of three gay friends living in San Francisco and starred out gay actors Jonathan Groff, Murray Bartlett, and Russell Tovey. While Looking was sadly canceled after two seasons it has left an indelible mark on queer TV.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the groundbreaking show, the cast and creative team behind Looking took part in a retrospective with GQ, where we learned that they had almost cast an actor who has since become a massive star, Attitude reports.
"I can't remember there being pressure to cast bigger names," writer-director Andrew Haigh (All of Us Strangers) said. "And then it's also, who were those bigger names? We didn't need all of the cast to be queer in real life, but we certainly wanted some of them to be."
Then casting director Carmen Cuba dropped the bomb that we almost got a version of the show with Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us) in one of the lead roles. "Especially in TV, you meet a lot of people… Pedro Pascal was someone we met [for a role on Looking] and from that, I put him on Narcos," she explained. "The thing with Pedro, it was like he was testing on a million things. So many of these things, as you know in casting, it's just like scheduling. Does scheduling work? Does the group? Because in this, we were really casting a group."
Now we're dying to know if Pascal was up for the role of video game designer Patrick (Groff), sommelier Dom (Bartlett), or Patrick's boss Kevin (Tovey)!
This isn't the only cast revelation we've gotten lately. Recently, Tovey opened up at a Q&A at the British Film Institute following a screening of All of Us Strangers and admitted that he initially tried out for the role of Patrick, but when he lost out to Groff, Haigh wrote a character into the show for him.
Looking was amazing just the way it was… but what we couldn't give to see a version of the series featuring Pedro Pascal!
Ariel Messman-Rucker is an Oakland-born journalist who now calls the Pacific Northwest her home. When she’s not writing about politics and queer pop culture, she can be found reading, hiking, or talking about horror movies with the Zombie Grrlz Horror Podcast Network.
Ariel Messman-Rucker is an Oakland-born journalist who now calls the Pacific Northwest her home. When she’s not writing about politics and queer pop culture, she can be found reading, hiking, or talking about horror movies with the Zombie Grrlz Horror Podcast Network.
