Spoilers for The Materialists ahead.
Actors get typecast all the time. Nicholas Hoult will be a sexually frustrated freak boy. Angela Bassett will play a head of state. This summer, Pedro Pascal has carved out an oddly specific niche for himself. The type isn’t “dashing leading man,” though he certainly qualifies for that, too. It’s not “target of a TERF-fueled cancellation campaign,” though this too is true. His type is actually much weirder. In two entirely separate films, in two very different genres, he plays “guy who makes his legs longer.”
The more famous of these characters is Reed Richards, a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic (not to be confused with Superman’s Mr. Terrific), from Marvel’s Fantastic 4: First Steps. Mr. Fantastic is the brains of his superhuman crew (he really shares a lot in common with Mr. Terrific), but he is perhaps best known as the one who can stretch himself into impossible shapes.
Weirder, though, is that he also grows his legs longer in Celine Song’s romantic drama The Materialists. In the movie, Dakota Johnson’s Lucy is caught between two very different prospects: her failed actor ex, John (Chris Evans), and Pedro Pascal as Harry, a sweet and polite and most importantly ultrawealthy but guarded-off finance guy. Harry barrels forward in his relationship with Lucy confidently and quickly, but it is clear to her that he’s not bringing his whole self to the relationship. Lucy, a professional matchmaker, wonders why he’s still single despite being a perfect catch — he is what people in her line of work call a unicorn. The audience half-expects some horrible skeletons in his closet … but the twist is actually, literally, his own horrible skeleton. One night while he’s sleeping, she gently fingers some scarring around his knee, which makes him wake up and confront her in the kitchen. The scars, it turns out, are from a limb-lengthening surgery. It turns out that Harry used to be a wee little dude (five-foot-six), with very little self-confidence when it came to both dating and business. So he and his brother (another “unicorn”) got their legs broken and lengthened to make them six inches taller.
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This isn’t just some quirky character detail. Pedro Pascal making his legs longer is the film’s turning point and the entire crux of this character’s arc. It is at this moment that Lucy breaks up with Harry; not because of the legs but because of the engagement ring she found in his bag. “It’s really hard for me to feel like this is not about the legs,” he says, totally straight-faced. It is by far the funniest line in an otherwise extremely dry and generally humorless movie. It sounds like something a Tim Robinson character would say on I Think You Should Leave.
I never thought of Pascal as particularly notably leggy, but the subject is actually something of a hangup for the actor. In 2022, he told Vanity Fair during his lie detector “I’m five-eleven naked, six feet with some good shoes,” and he passed. He also showed off his legs in little shorts at the 2023 Met Gala, and in an interview this year he looked back on the outfit and said, “This is the most fun I’ve ever had wearing anything.” The guy is proud of his legs! And why shouldn’t he be? In his third movie of the summer, Ari Aster’s Eddington, Pascal is taller than Joaquin Phoenix, and that matters because his character makes Phoenix’s feel insecure. Maybe it’s all just a weird coincidence that I’m reading far too much into, but it’s really hard for me to feel like this is not about the legs.
He’s not! Okay? Photo: Screenshot via @joelsashes on X
