Apple Asked Pedro Pascal to Dance Through a Breakup. Spike Jonze Directed It. 200 Million People Watched. And Nobody Called It an Ad.
A HEARTBROKEN MAN. A WINTRY CITY. AIRPODS 4. And a five-and-a-half-minute SPIKE JONZE film that became one of the most-watched pieces of content on the internet — and spawned a TIKTOK DANCE TREND that is still going. This is the story of SOMEDAY.
In March 2025, Apple released an advertisement for AirPods 4. It was five and a half minutes long. It starred PEDRO PASCAL. It was directed by SPIKE JONZE — the filmmaker behind Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Her, for which he won an Oscar. It had a choreographer whose previous clients include Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Drake.
It also had 200 million views across digital platforms within weeks of release. It spawned a TikTok dance trend that spread to every corner of the internet. It was covered by entertainment outlets as though it were a short film premiere rather than a product campaign. Millions of people watched it who do not own AirPods and have no intention of purchasing them.
Nobody called it an ad. Everyone called it Someday.
Someday follows PEDRO PASCAL‘s unnamed character through a wintry, grey city — a man in the specific quiet devastation of a fresh heartbreak. The world around him is muted. Cold. Stripped of color. He moves through it with the particular stillness of someone who has not yet figured out how to start moving again.
He puts in his AirPods. Activates Active Noise Cancellation. And the world changes.
The grey palette bursts into color — saturated, warm, kaleidoscopic. The people around him on the street begin to move. First subtly, then completely. A city that was frozen becomes a dance. PEDRO PASCAL‘s character, who moments ago could barely put one foot in front of the other, finds himself at the center of something that feels, impossibly, like joy.
In one of the film’s most quietly devastating moments, his character has an out-of-body experience: he sees a vision of himself — lighter, freer, his heartbreak not yet healed but somehow already further away. The two versions of himself make eye contact across a winter street. And something passes between them that the film never has to name.
By the end, Pedro Pascal is dancing in a cityscape full of flower petals. The heartbreak has not vanished. But it has, somehow, become survivable.
“It’s illustrating this idea that when you put on your AirPods and you put on Active Noise Cancellation, your whole world transforms with the music you choose to put on.” — Producer Jorie Feldman, on the concept of Someday
To understand why Someday hit the way it did, you need to understand who made it and what they each brought to the collaboration.
SPIKE JONZE has spent his entire career making films about the interior life of feeling things — specifically about the way music, technology, and imagination transform ordinary human experience into something larger and stranger than the circumstances warrant. Her is a love story about an operating system. Being John Malkovich is a film about identity and consciousness told through a portal in an office building. Someday is a film about heartbreak told through noise-cancelling earbuds. The logic is perfectly consistent.
The choreography was designed by TANISHA SCOTT — a choreographer whose resume includes work with Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Drake, and whose approach to movement is built around emotional specificity rather than technical display. Scott’s job was to make PEDRO PASCAL‘s character’s emotional journey legible through his body — to show, in motion, the transition from grief to something like hope.
The costumes, by designer Kym Barrett, used a system of two-tone fabric and color shifts that tracked the character’s internal state: the muted, desaturated palette of heartbreak giving way, piece by piece, to the vivid warmth of renewal. The color change was not just background decoration. It was character development.
And at the center of all of it: PEDRO PASCAL, dancing through a grief sequence in a major commercial campaign with the same emotional transparency he brings to Joel Miller’s breakdowns or Din Djarin’s helmet-off moments. No irony. No self-consciousness. All the way in.
The film was shot in two distinct visual environments — a cold, wintry city and a warm, blooming dreamscape — with smooth transitions between them that tracked Pascal’s character’s shifting emotional state. The costume changes were built into the choreography: as he danced, his colors changed. By the end, nothing he was wearing was the same color it had been at the beginning. That was the point.
Why this is not just an ad — and why Pedro Pascal was the only possible choice
There is a version of Someday that does not work. That version stars an actor who approaches the material with a certain knowing wink — who plays heartbreak at a slight remove, who keeps a layer of irony between himself and the reality of dancing his grief out on a city street in front of a full production crew.
That version would have been a very competent commercial. It would not have had 200 million views. It would not have spawned a TikTok trend in which ordinary people recreated Pedro Pascal’s dance for their own reasons, in their own cities, because something in the film made them want to.
The version that exists stars PEDRO PASCAL. A man who, as every director and co-star who has worked with him confirms, simply does not protect himself from the material. Who goes all the way in. Who makes a five-and-a-half minute Apple commercial feel, for reasons that are difficult to articulate precisely, like a genuine emotional experience.
There is a moment in Someday when Pedro Pascal makes eye contact with the vision of his own freer self across a winter street. It is a brief moment. It is entirely wordless. And it is — and this should not be possible in a product advertisement — genuinely moving.
That is the Pedro Pascal effect. You cannot manufacture it. You cannot explain it fully. You can only watch it happen and wonder, as millions of people apparently did, why this particular man dancing through a wintry city to cope with a breakup feels like something that is about you.
“Pedro Pascal using Active Noise Cancellation on his AirPods 4 to cope with a recent breakup” — the original description. What it became: one of the most-watched films on the internet in 2025. Not an exaggeration. Just what happened.
The TikTok dance trend that Someday spawned is, in its own way, the most telling data point of the film’s entire cultural reception.
People recreated the dance not because they were trying to promote AirPods. They recreated it because something about watching PEDRO PASCAL move through heartbreak toward something like joy gave them permission to do the same thing in their own lives. The film became, for a period, a shared reference point for a very particular feeling — the specific, exhausting, ultimately survivable experience of moving through grief by moving your body when you do not feel like moving at all.
That is what Pedro Pascal keeps doing, in project after project, medium after medium: he finds the specific, human, universally recognizable emotional truth inside the material — inside the Mandalorian’s stoicism, inside Joel Miller’s rage, inside Reed Richards’ devotion, inside an Apple advertisement about noise-cancelling earbuds — and he holds it up to the light until it becomes something you recognize from your own life.
200 million views. A TikTok trend. An Oscar-winning director. A choreographer who works with Beyoncé. And PEDRO PASCAL, dancing in a city, letting himself feel everything, making it look inevitable.
That is, in the end, what Someday is about. What it has always been about, underneath the AirPods and the color palette and the choreography. A man learning, again, how to keep going. The same story Pedro Pascal keeps telling, in every form he can find to tell it.
The commercial just happened to be the version that 200 million people watched at once.
“Your whole world transforms with the music you choose to put on.” — And Pedro Pascal danced, and we all felt it, and that was the point.
