Pedro Pascal of “Narcos”: “Escobar’s life was like a Shakespearean drama”

The noose tightens and Escobar’s days are numbered. The second season of “Narcos” portrays the fall of the allpowerful Colombian drug lord, which leads Chilean actor Pedro Pascal, a star of the series, to compare the criminal’s life story to great theater.

“Escobar’s story is really like a Shakespearean drama or a Greek tragedy. It’s the story of a king of the cocaine industry, one of the richest men in the world, whose fall came very quickly,” Pascal said in a telephone interview with EFE.

“Narcos” premieres its second season this Friday on the Netflix digital content platform, and after relating in its first series the years of the drug lord’s rise to power and his implacable reign, will show in these new episodes his precipitate fall, how vulnerable he became in just a few months and, finally, his death on a rooftop in Medellin.

Shot in Colombia, “Narcos” has a cast featuring Brazil’s Wagner Moura, praised for his interpretation of Escobar; Pedro Pascal and Boyd Holbrook as agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA, who try to catch him; and a host of Latino actors including Paulina Gaitan, Stephanie Sigman and Damian Alcazar.

The second season focuses on Escobar’s death, which according to Pascal will be shown in “the most authentic way possible” and without “reinventing” what happened.

The actor, known for his role in “Game of Thrones” and who will appear with Matt Damon in the film “The Great Wall,” unreservedly praised his colleague Moura’s portrayal of the Escobar character.

Pascal said that Escobar was one of the world’s dark, evil figures, but it’s never clear that his enemies were always the good guys in the story.

“There’s no sense in seeing things in black and white. I believe the reality of our life and of this world is that there’s not just a moralistic way to approach your work,” Pascal said, referring to the tendency of his character, agent Javier Peña, to walk blindly on a tight rope between what is right and what is legal.

“What I like most about the series is how it visually captures the feeling of being in Colombia, in Bogota and Medellin and on the coast...It’s a world with a personality reflected in the land, in the people, that is unique, something special and very beautiful. I think Colombia is the star of the series,” he said.

By David Villafranca