Pedro Pascal is calling Ari Aster’s new film Eddington a story filled with “all our worst fears” in today’s world, especially the post-COVID-19 world.
At the 2025 Cannes press event, the 50-year-old Chilean-American actor, along with filmmaker Aster and actor Joaquin Phoenix, discussed how the film deals with MAGA culture and Donald Trump.
For the unversed, Eddington is about what happened after Covid, from the rise of social media to how Black Lives Matter affected the country.
The movie follows crusty Sheriff Joe Cross, played by Phoenix, who decides to go against the town’s mayor, Ted Garcia, played by Pascal, but things do not go in his favour, so he tries to go handle the situation on his own.
At the event, Pascal was asked how the movie’s politics connected to the Trump era, to which he replied, “It’s very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this; it’s far too intimidating a question for me to address. I’m not informed enough. I want people to be safe and protective. I want very much to be on the right side of history.”
He continued, “I felt like [Aster] wrote something that was all our worst fears as that lockdown experience was already a fracturing society. This was building toward an untethered sense of reality, and there is a point of not going back. I was overwhelmed by that fear, and it’s wonderful it was confirmed by Ari.”
Aster talked about the film by saying, “I wrote this movie in a state of fear and anxiety. I wanted to try and pull back and show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real anymore.”
“I feel like for the last 20 years we’ve fallen into this age of hyper-individualism and that social force that used to be central in liberal mass democracies, which is an agreed-upon thing in the world, that is gone now. Covid felt like the moment where that link was finely cut for good,” he noted.
It is pertinent to mention that Eddington will be released in cinemas on July 18, 2025.