He Was Alone in Lucerne. His Heart Was Broken. He Fell to His Knees by a Park Bench and Asked It to Come Alive and Save Him. Then Pedro Pascal Sent That Story to a Friend.

In June 2024, singer OMAR APOLLO released a song called “Pedro.” At its center is a VOICE MEMO from PEDRO PASCAL — two minutes of unguarded, unscripted grief that nobody expected the most famous man in Hollywood to share. This is what the memo says. And this is why it matters.

There is a version of PEDRO PASCAL that the world has decided on. The protector. The internet’s beloved father figure. The man who carries children across galaxies and teenagers through apocalypses and pregnant wives through battles with cosmic gods. The man who dances through heartbreak in Spike Jonze films and stands at Cannes and says fear is the way they win. The man who is, in the public imagination, almost uncomfortably warm, almost superhumanly together.

And then there is the voice memo.

In June 2024, singer OMAR APOLLO released his second album, God Said No. On the penultimate track — track 13, titled simply “Pedro” — the song begins with Omar’s voice, singing about grief and longing. And then it transitions into something that stops listeners cold: a recording of PEDRO PASCAL’s own voice, slightly hesitant, unpolished, beginning with the words:

“Mm, okay. I’m not sure how to start this.”
“I remember I finished a job, and I was too scared to go back to the US. It was like the second wave of COVID in Europe. And I was going from Budapest to Switzerland. That was a place I could get to to buy some time and figure out what I would do before Christmas. And I also arrived, um, very shattered. I’d had an incredible time on a job. But my heart was, uh, pretty shattered by something. And I remember walking — I think it must have been Lucerne. I remember thinking the saying, ‘it brought me to my knees.’ And it was this sort of residential area. And I remember just literally being kind of brought to my knees by a park bench. And I remember asking the park bench to come alive and save me. ‘Cause I didn’t feel like there was kind of any moment past that moment. But there was. There was. I can’t believe I’m sending you this.”

— Pedro Pascal, voice memo sent to Omar Apollo, 2024
OMAR APOLLO, now 27, became close with Pedro Pascal through what began as a professional encounter — Pascal was asked to participate in a profile of the singer. They became genuine friends. “Omar is a very good friend of mine,” Pedro told GQ in May 2024. “He’s also like me, someone who grew up bilingual. I love being a friend in each other’s journeys — and uplifting whatever I can creatively, supporting whatever creative experience he’s having as a friend, as an artist, as a Latino, as a Spanish speaker.”

When Apollo was finishing God Said No, he played Pedro the album’s closing track, “Glow” — a song about grief and its particular, non-linear complexities. And he had an idea. He told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe: “I had the idea that it would be really beautiful if he said a story about grief — a colossal loss.”

Pedro sent a voice memo. He did not script it. He began with uncertainty — “I’m not sure how to start this” — and then simply told a story. A moment from 2020. A city in Switzerland. A park bench. And a request he made to an inanimate object in a residential street because he could not think of anything else to ask.

Apollo told Zane Lowe: “He sent a voice memo. It’s a very beautiful story. It’s very heart-shattering.”

“And I remember asking the park bench to come alive and save me. ‘Cause I didn’t feel like there was kind of any moment past that moment. But there was. There was.” — Pedro Pascal, voice memo, 2020/2024

What he was not saying — and what he was

The voice memo contains several things Pedro Pascal deliberately does not name. He does not say what the job was. He does not say what — or who — shattered his heart. He does not say what the grief was about, precisely, because the grief is not the subject of the recording. The subject of the recording is the physical, bodily experience of being overcome by it. The specific detail of a park bench in a residential street in what he thinks was Lucerne. The specific strangeness of asking an inanimate object to become something that could save you.

That level of specificity — while leaving the cause entirely unnamed — is the mark of someone who knows how to tell a true story. He gives you the texture and the sensation and the geography without giving you the narrative. You do not need to know what broke his heart to understand completely what it felt like. The park bench does that work. The residential street does that work. The voice that starts with “I’m not sure how to start this” and ends with “I can’t believe I’m sending you this” does that work entirely.

Omar Apollo’s description — “a colossal loss” — is the only external framing we get. Pedro himself never categorizes it. He just tells you where he was standing when it happened to him. That is, in its way, the most intimate thing anyone can share.

The ending of the memo — “But there was. There was.” — is the quiet pivot that makes the whole recording something other than a document of despair. He is not sending Omar Apollo a story about the worst moment he has ever lived. He is sending him a story about surviving the worst moment he has ever lived. The park bench did not come alive. Something else did. Enough to get him through Christmas. Enough to get him here.

Why this is the most Pedro Pascal thing he has ever done

Everything Pedro Pascal has ever done publicly that people love him for follows the same logic as that voice memo. He does not perform openness. He does not manage vulnerability into palatability. He simply tells you a true thing, in the most specific terms he can find, and trusts that the truth will land.

The voice that says “I’m not sure how to start this” at the beginning of the memo is the same voice that said “I am an immigrant, my parents are refugees” at Cannes while admitting he was too afraid of the question to properly answer it. It is the same person who took his mother’s name after she was gone and carried her into every credit. Who stood on a Super Bowl stage because a friend needed someone to show up. Who posted Pride captions without explanation. Who said fear is the way they win while visibly being afraid.

There is a quality that runs through all of it — an unwillingness to protect himself from the truth of his own experience. To tidy it up before sharing it. The voice memo begins in uncertainty and ends in disbelief at his own willingness to send it. That is not performance. That is a person.

PEDRO PASCAL asked a park bench to come alive and save him. And then, years later, he recorded himself saying so and sent it to a friend who put it on an album for the world to hear. And what the world heard — in 2024, when the album dropped, and in 2025 when it kept circulating, and now — is someone who survived something and was willing to say exactly how close it was.

That is not the image of a man who has it together. That is a man who did not have it together, in a residential street in Lucerne, in winter, during a pandemic, alone. And who is here now to tell you about the park bench. And about the but there was.

That is, in the end, why people love him the way they do. Not because he seems invulnerable. Because he is clearly not — and shows you so, completely, without apology.

“I can’t believe I’m sending you this.” — He sent it anyway. And we are all grateful that he did.