She Gave Him Her Per Diem So He Could Eat. Now He Pays for Dinner. The 30-Year Friendship Between Pedro Pascal and Sarah Paulson That Nobody Talks About Enough.

New York City. Two broke young actors who had no idea what was coming. SARAH PAULSON gave PEDRO PASCAL money to feed himself. Three decades later, she calls him “a bitch baby” on live television and he picks up the check. This is what 30 years of real friendship looks like.

Before The Mandalorian. Before Joel Miller. Before Reed Richards and Marcus Acacius and Oberyn Martell and every red carpet and every headline and every TikTok video. Before any of it — there was a young woman named SARAH PAULSON handing a young man named PEDRO PASCAL her per diem money so he could afford to eat.

That is where this story begins. Not on a set. Not at a premiere. In the financial reality of two people in their twenties trying to become actors in New York City in the 1990s, when one of them was struggling so severely that feeding himself required help from a friend.

The year is 2025. SARAH PAULSON appears on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen. Cohen asks who pays for dinner now. Paulson answers without hesitation: “He pays for dinner now.” She also refers to Pedro, with thirty years of earned intimacy, as “a bitch baby.” The audience loves it. Pedro, presumably, does too.

This is what thirty years of genuine friendship sounds like from the outside. Affection so old and so settled that it can sustain being called a bitch baby on national television. Money given when there was nothing. Dinners paid for now that there is everything. And a bond that has survived distance, estrangement, wildly different career trajectories, and the specific pressure of watching one person you have always believed in finally become what you always knew they would.

“I always knew he was the most talented person I knew. And I knew that if anything was right in the world, that his working life would become this.” — Sarah Paulson, Watch What Happens Live, 2025

How it started — New York, 1993

They met, as the best friendships often do, before either of them was anyone. SARAH PAULSON had just graduated from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School — the school that inspired the film Fame — and was beginning her acting career in New York. PEDRO PASCAL was studying at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. They found each other in the particular ecosystem of young artists in New York in the early 1990s — a world of ambition and very little money and a great deal of shared belief in futures that had not yet arrived.

Paulson, in a 2014 interview with Interview magazine, described knowing him “since I was 18.” In a later interview with Esquire in April 2025, she recalled the texture of those early years with the specificity of someone whose memory holds onto things that mattered: “It’s a wonder we survived. When I think about the debauchery, the things that we did, the kind of stuff we were pulling and the way we were behaving, I don’t even know how we made it to the next morning, much less 20 years later.”

They bonded over a day that Paulson describes as cosmically significant — being knocked off by a cab, seeing Woody Harrelson, watching the film Fearless, all in the same day. “You’re either bonded for life or you’ll never see each other again,” she said.

They were bonded for life.

Then · Early 1990s

Sarah gives Pedro her per diem money so he can afford to eat. He is struggling to make rent. He has less than $7 in his bank account at certain points. She never stops believing in him.

Now · 2025

Pedro pays for dinner. Sarah calls him “a bitch baby” on live TV. They attend the opening night of Evita together in London. Thirty years. Still attached. Still unable to let go.

The years of struggling — and what she did

There was a period in the late 1990s when PEDRO PASCAL and SARAH PAULSON went through what she called “a period of estrangement” — not a fight, not a rupture, simply the drift that happens when two people are living in different cities and pursuing different trajectories. Paulson had moved to Los Angeles and was working steadily. Pedro described her as “the first of all of us that started working and never stopped.”

But the distance did not last. When Pedro returned to New York in 2000 — after the death of his mother, having changed his name to Pascal in her honor — the friendship resumed. And the circumstances it resumed into were difficult.

He was struggling. Genuinely, practically, financially struggling. He had small TV roles — Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Touched by an Angel — but not enough to live on. He was fired from waiting tables, by his own count, close to ten times. He had less than seven dollars in his bank account at one point. A residual check from Buffy helped him stabilize enough to keep going.

And SARAH PAULSON gave him her per diem money. Not once. During a period of time, when she was working and he was not, she handed him money from her own earnings so that he could feed himself.

Paulson described this in an Esquire interview in 2025 — not as a dramatic sacrifice, but as a simple thing a friend does when another friend needs it. “He’s talked about this publicly,” she noted, “but there were times when I would give him my per diem from a job I was working on so that he could have money to feed himself.”

It was also Paulson who, years later, connected Pedro to the casting world that eventually led to Game of Thrones. The friendship was not just emotional support — it was practical, career-altering, life-changing support, given before anyone had any reason to believe the investment would pay off at the scale it eventually did. She believed in him not because the evidence said to. She believed in him because she had been watching him since she was 18 and she knew.

Thirty years — what it looks like now

July 1, 2025. London. The opening night of Evita at the London Palladium. SARAH PAULSON and PEDRO PASCAL arrive together — inseparable, as one British outlet noted, in the way of people who have known each other for so long that the togetherness requires no explanation.

The photo from that night circulated widely. Two people in their early fifties, dressed beautifully, standing in London on a Tuesday night because they both wanted to see a musical and they wanted to see it together. Thirty years after a cab knocked them off their feet in New York and they decided to be bonded for life.

1993

They meet in New York — she is 18, fresh out of LaGuardia High School; he is at NYU Tisch. Knocked over by a cab, see Woody Harrelson and Fearless in the same day. Bonded for life.

Late 1990s

Period of drift — she moves to LA and works steadily; he stays in New York, struggling. They stay friends but lose some proximity.

2000s

Reunion and survival. She gives him per diem money to eat. He is fired from waiting tables repeatedly. She never stops believing in him.

2019

His Broadway debut as Edmund in King Lear. She is in the audience. Posts on Instagram: “I am in awe of you.”

July 2025

Opening night of Evita, London. They attend together. Thirty years after New York. Still unable to let go.

Nov 2025

Watch What Happens Live. Cohen asks who pays for dinner now. Paulson: “He pays for dinner now.” Also calls him “a bitch baby.” He is presumably thriving.

On Watch What Happens Live in November 2025, Andy Cohen asked Paulson who pays for dinner now. Her answer — “He pays for dinner now” — is one of the most complete summaries of a thirty-year arc imaginable. Not a sentimental speech. Not a formal acknowledgment. Just a statement of the current arrangement, delivered with the easy shorthand of someone who has been keeping track of who owes whom across three decades and considers the ledger now balanced.
She also told Cohen: “I always knew he was the most talented person I knew. And I knew that if anything was right in the world, that his working life would become this. It’s not surprising to me from a talent level.”

She knew in 1993. She gave him money to eat in the 2000s. She watched his Broadway debut from the audience in 2019. She called him a bitch baby on national television in 2025. And in between all of that: thirty years of a friendship that looks, from the outside, like the kind of thing most people spend their whole lives hoping to have.

The most famous man in Hollywood right now was once a person who needed someone to give him money to eat. And that person, who gave it without hesitation, is still the person he calls first when there is a musical in London he wants to see.

He pays for dinner now. That is the whole story. And it is a very good one.

“He pays for dinner now.” — Sarah Paulson, 2025. Three decades. Full circle. Both of them exactly where they always should have been.