Pedro Pascal recalls road rage incident to Steven Yeun: The driver 'spit at me'

Pedro Pascal and Steven Yeun bonded over road rage and the post-apocalypse in Variety's latest edition of Actors on Actors.

Pascal recalled one recent incident where a driver spat a "big glob of saliva" on his car. "Yesterday was a day. It was my fault. I've had three incidents, and they've all been my fault," the Last of Us star told Yeun, who co-headlines the Netflix road rage dramedy Beef. "I cut somebody off, and I look over, and there's a big glob of saliva — like visual effects put it there, man — just dripping down the side of the passenger window. And my sister was like, "F---!"

"Holy s---. Like a glob from the driver's side? He just hocked a hard loogie at you?" Yeun asked.

"He spit at me," Pascal confirmed. "I was in shock. It didn't trigger any rage out of me. It absolutely humbled me and shocked me, scared me a little bit, disturbed me."

"I wonder if your consciousness about not reacting to that negatively is you recognizing that person's trying to connect with you in some way," Yeun said in response, noting that he was also recently "flipped off" by a driver.

Pascal replied: "They want me to drink in their saliva. It made me feel guilty. I was like, 'Gosh, people are going through shit.'"

Elsewhere, Yeun, who rose to prominence on the zombie horror series The Walking Dead, said he felt "weirdly connected" to Pascal "in a multitude of ways," citing how his turn as Joel on HBO's adaptation of video game series The Last of Us, also centered on an apocalyptic world in post-outbreak America.

"One is when I was shooting The Walking Dead — a show that is kind of spiritually connected to your show — the Last of Us game came out, and I played it 12 hours straight," Yeun shared. "I remember finishing it and then coming to set the next day being catatonic. Like, 'Guys, I just experienced something.' And then to see you play that part. You fall into your characters in a way that I think is so gracious."

Pascal also revealed that he has yet to watch the Last of Us season 1 finale, which aired in March. "I haven't done anything for that amount of time before, and so my attachment to the experience is strange," he said. "As a guy who's pushing 50, to feel this very innocent, semi-angry, emotional attachment to an experience that's over... I think it was like falling in love, and at the point where you're like, 'I don't fall in love.' You know? Because it hurts too much."

The finale saw Joel and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) at long last reach the Firefly base, only for Joel to refuse to accept the sacrifice of Ellie's life for a vaccine cure, killing everyone on site at the hospital as a result. "I'm not suggesting that I have a hard opinion about how things go at the end — and I don't," series creator Craig Mazin said at a press conference at the time. "I'm confused about it morally. I think it's a difficult choice. I go back and forth, and I think a lot of people will go back and forth on it."

Watch Pascal and Yeun's interview in full above.

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