Sarah Paulson helped financially support an early career Pedro Pascal

One of the details Sarah Paulson remembers most about her early years of friendship with Pedro Pascal is their time spent together in the comforting darkness of the movie theater. After meeting Pascal in the early 1990s in New York City when she was a recent LaGuardia High School graduate and he was a student at Tisch, Paulson recalls going to see films with him “all the time in those years.”

“We would get so lost in them,” Paulson tells Esquire’s Dave Holmes in a recent profile on Pascal. “You can fill in the blanks about the why of that however you like, but I think there were things we wanted to escape mentally, emotionally, spiritually.”

Over their decades-long friendship, finding ways to escape the slog of the industry became key to supporting each other, be it a night at the movies or a more direct form of aid. In fact, Paulson shares that in the past she helped The Last Of Us star make ends meet during leaner times in his now-blossoming career.

“He’s talked about this publicly,” Paulson says of Pascal, “but there were times when I would give him my per diem from a job I was working on so that he could have money to feed himself.”

These days, Paulson and Pascal’s reciprocity looks a little bit different: less like pooling funds for his next meal, and more like Paulson’s appearance on Pascal’s recent Saturday Night Live episode as the “mommy” to his “daddy” in a sketch set in a public high school. As two of the most in-demand actors in the industry, the duo has come a long way from fighting off post-graduate malaise at the movies, wondering how their lives would unfurl.

“My vision of it was that if I didn’t have some major exposure by the time I was twenty-nine years old, it was over, so I was constantly readjusting what it meant to commit my life to this profession, and giving up the idea of it looking like I thought it would when I was a kid,” Pascal shares of his early years in the industry. The way he sees it, changing his mindset was mostly upside: “There were so many good reasons to let that delusion go.”