Creator of the Viral Pedro Pascal Fancam Explains Why the Actor Is TikTok’s Favorite Daddy
Every Sunday night, fans of Pedro Pascal can tune in to HBO to watch the Chilean-American actor star as the stoic, sexy, reluctant father figure Joel in The Last Of Us. But on TikTok, weekly episodes aren’t enough — stanning Pascal is a full-time gig. Fans on the app have crowned 47-year-old Pascal the “daddy of the moment” in the only way it knows how: inundating For You pages everywhere with fan edits. Also known as fancams, edits usually take videos of a popular actor and smash them together into a short but heavily edited clip full of transitions, filters, and of course, a rousing backing track. While edits can be used to convey a variety of emotions, their most popular forms usually serve one purpose: a thirst trap.
And if there is one thing people on TikTok can agree on, it’s that Pedro Pascal is smoking hot. The hashtag #pedropascaledit has over 654.2 million views on the app, with most of the top 100 viewed edits posted within the last month alone. But in a sea of imitators, one edit has risen above them all: a video from TikTok user @dvcree made from clips of Pascal’s role as Agent Whiskey in Kingsman 2: The Golden Circle.
“How would you like to ride home on a real cowboy? Pascal (as Whiskey) croons in the edit. “I got a six-pack of cold ones on ice, and my roomie’s out all night, so you can scream my name as loud as you need to sugar!” As the dialogue ends, heavily filtered clips of Pascal in the film slam on the screen to the sultry backing of Shaggy’s “Hey Sexy Lady.”
Since it was posted on Jan. 20, the video has been viewed 16.4 million times, liked 2.3 million times, and — in one of the biggest signs of thirst success on TikTok — has been saved 800,000 times. @dvcree’s video is no longer another Pedro Pascal edit. It’s THE Pedro Pascal edit.
So Rolling Stone tracked down @dvcree, the creator of the edit, to talk about why gen z is so obsessed with fan edits and why Pedro Pascal will always be daddy.
While much of the Pascal thirst is centered around American media, @dvcree, one of Pascal’s biggest fans, is actually a 21-year-old student from Sweden named Sandra. She tells Rolling Stone that a lot of Pascal’s sex appeal comes from his real-life kindness and love for the LGBTQ+ community — Pascal is a huge supporter of his transgender sister Lux — which makes it easier for people to sexualize even his most intense characters.
“There’s just something about him,” Sandra says. “His vibe is very chill. But he’s active and supportive of the LGBTQ+ community. He’s very open about it. And being a part of the community myself, I feel like that’s really important. It feels really good because that means your favorite celebrity supports you as well. He’s older, and he’s mature, and he’s very attractive. He is just, daddy.”
According to Sandra, she had no idea that the edit would reach so many people. In fact, she says she was expecting the video to flop, mostly because Pascal’s appearance in Kingsman is one of his lesser-known roles.
“Dvcree started a revolution like….” one comment reads. It’s been liked 20,000 times.
In one video, two friends silently flash each other the edit through their car windows.
“No, because why have we all seen that ONE EDIT,’ said popular creators Alex and Pablo in a TikTok of them recreating the fancam word for word.
And while Sandra isn’t certain, it’s possible the edit also inspired a recent skit on Saturday Night Live, where a hosting Pascal, playing a high school teacher, begs his students to stop making fan edits of him.
“I just don’t understand,” he says to a laughing crowd. “Why do you make sparkly fast romantic montages of me every day?”
Sandra tells Rolling Stone that while the edit’s popularity was unexpected, she’s glad that people are enjoying something that initially started as a hobby for her.
“’I’m a very creative person,” she says. “And I can have these fixations on actors or movies and can have a lot of emotions. To stabilize them, I need to create something so it’s not the only thing I can think about 24/7. These fan edits I do is just taking what’s inside my head and putting it on a video.”
As a child of the internet, Sandra doesn’t consider making fancams difficult. She says she made her first one at 14: a video of Louis Tomlinson from One Direction. But as video edits have become a bigger part of online fandoms, Sandra has begun posting free tutorials on her website so fans can learn how to make their own.
“[Fan edits] are sort of my getaway from the world and my escape,” she says. “I just want to let other people have that same feeling. And for people that don’t really know where to start, to give them that kick in the butt.”
While Sandra says Gen Z is open about lusting after actors or musicians, she says that going so far as to make fan edits or fan pages can still be considered taboo or intense. She tells Rolling Stone that she hopes the mainstream thirst on TikTok, and all the love for Pascal, can encourage people to be loud and proud about their obsessions — especially if they’re fancams.
“I’ve seen a lot of people commenting that they didn’t really understand the [Pedro] hype until they saw my edits. So it’s really fun seeing that I can have that effect on people by just making a video,” she says. “Our [generation] — we’re very visual people. We like seeing videos being connected to music to create this mood. For me, you see these clips and they create this special feeling inside of you. And there shouldn’t be a limit to that. Everyone should be able to feel happy and overdo whatever they love.”
