Bella Ramsey might’ve played the kid who helped turn Pedro Pascal into the internet’s favorite daddy (with help from Baby Yoda) but now, the Last of Us star suspects that the bit might’ve gotten out of hand.
“I don’t know whether he’s still loving it,” Ramsey told Vanity Fair during a recent interview. “I need to ask him. He’s a global phenomenon as he should be, because he’s pretty spectacular.”
Ramsey, who is nonbinary and uses all pronouns, plays a young girl named Ellie in HBO’s mega-hit mushroom-zombie series. Pascal plays Joel—who escorts her across what remains of the U.S. in the hopes that her immunity to the zombie infection can help create a cure. Much like Pascal’s Mandalorian character, Din Djarin, Joel’s reluctance as a guardian belies deep sensitivity underneath. Hot!
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Pascal has addressed his “daddy” image many times over the years, including in a steamy Vanity Fair Lie Detector video in which he said (huskily) “Daddy is a state of mind. I’m your daddy.” In January, he declared himself our “cool, slutty daddy” while speaking with Entertainment Tonight, and earlier this week, during a Hollywood Reporter roundtable, Pascal said he said he was “having fun with” the image, even if the narrative underpinning it “seems a little role-related.”
“There was a period where the Mandalorian is very daddy to baby Grogu, and Joel is very daddy to Ellie,” Pascal said. “These are daddy parts. That’s what it is… I’m not a daddy and I’m not going to be a daddy.”
As they reflected on the “daddy” phenomenon with Vanity Fair, Ramsey said, “I very much played into it at the beginning, but now I’m worried it’s gone too far.”
Beyond the at times cringey levels of horniness that have accompanied Pascal-daddy worship, the “daddy” narrative might not be the most accurate way to characterize Ramsey and Pascal’s relationship.
“It was sometimes like father-daughter energy, but most of the time it was like two annoying siblings who like love each other and annoy everybody else,” Ramsey told VF in a video interview posted earlier this spring. “I also felt like I was his dad sometimes. I told him to like, breathe. Like, “It’s okay, you are doing a great job.”
“Most of the time,” they joked, “Pedro was the daughter.”
This contradiction might just lie at the heart of Pascal’s appeal. While he is certainly a prototypical daddy—perhaps even the finest specimen of daddyhood we’ve seen yet—he is also, as my colleague Kyndall Cunningham recently pointed out, one of the internet’s favorite babygirls. We have yet to hear how Pascal feels about this distinction.
Mashable defines “babygirl” as “a phrase used to describe when a man is so primally attractive that you want to provide for him.” Cunningham, meanwhile, writes that “calling a man ‘babygirl’ seems like an act of infantilization and, obviously, feminization rather than a direct expression of lust. Its usage brings to mind the cutesy internet term to describe a small, precious person, “smol bean,” or the adjacent “cinnamon roll” Tumblr meme.”
At the same time, babygirls do not tend to have any awareness or agency in building that brand for themselves. “In other words, you don’t choose the babygirl lifestyle,” Cunningham writes. “It chooses you.”
How can one man be both daddy and babygirl? Is this what happens when fighting skills meet emotional intelligence? Perhaps. Or maybe the internet has simply rotted out all of our brains, leaving behind only lust and parasocial protectiveness. Either way, long live Pedro Pascal—our daddy, our babygirl, our favorite snacking meme, and most importantly, a simply delightful actor to watch on screens big and small.
