He Called Them “Linked Souls.” She Said Most of the Time, Pedro Pascal Was the Daughter. The Untold Story of the Most Unusual Friendship in Television.

On screen: PEDRO PASCAL was the grieving father protecting BELLA RAMSEY’s teenage girl through the apocalypse. Off screen: Bella told Pedro to breathe. Bella worried the “internet daddy” meme had gone too far. And Pedro called them “linked souls” — while Bella described him as “my blessing.” This is the real story.

The screen version is well documented. Joel Miller — scarred, armored, closed-off — drags himself across a post-apocalyptic America, delivering a teenage girl he has no reason to love. And failing, spectacularly, to not love her anyway. One of the greatest performances of Pedro Pascal’s career. One of the most celebrated on-screen relationships in recent television history.

The real version is stranger, warmer, and considerably funnier.

Off screen, PEDRO PASCAL — who is 51 years old, who has been working in this industry for three decades, who is the most franchised leading actor alive — was, by the account of his own co-star, frequently the one who needed to be told to breathe.

“Most of the time,” said BELLA RAMSEY, with full sincerity, “Pedro was the daughter.”

“It was sometimes like father-daughter energy, but most of the time it was like two annoying siblings who love each other and annoy everybody else. I also felt like I was his dad sometimes. I told him to breathe. ‘It’s okay, you are doing a great job.’ Most of the time, Pedro was the daughter.” — Bella Ramsey, Vanity Fair, 2023

How it started — Game of Thrones, a “family,” and two people who already understood each other

Before The Last of Us began, PEDRO PASCAL and BELLA RAMSEY had something in common that gave them an immediate shorthand: both had played beloved characters on Game of Thrones who were taken from the audience far too soon. Pedro as Oberyn Martell in Season 4. Bella as Lyanna Mormont — the most ferociously determined child in Westeros — before her unforgettable exit in Season 8.

In a January 2023 interview with Entertainment Weekly, both of them described the Game of Thrones connection as the foundation for the dynamic they built on The Last of Us. “We came from a family,” Pedro said — meaning the world of that show, its community, its specific culture of actors who had been part of something enormous and knew what it cost to leave it. That shared experience meant they arrived on the same wavelength before they had even properly met.

What they found when they got on set was something more complicated and more interesting than a standard professional working relationship. There was a 28-year age gap between them. There was the obvious potential for a simple on-screen dynamic — the older man, the younger girl, the protective instinct that the story required — to bleed into the off-screen relationship in predictable ways.

That is not what happened.

“It was sometimes like father-daughter energy, but most of the time it was like two annoying siblings who like love each other and annoy everybody else.” — Bella Ramsey. The distinction is doing significant work here. The show required Joel to protect Ellie. The friendship required something more mutual — and considerably more chaotic.

The “internet daddy” meme — and why Bella tried to protect Pedro from it

By the time The Last of Us Season 1 had aired, PEDRO PASCAL‘s transformation into the internet’s beloved “daddy” was complete. The combination of Din Djarin in The Mandalorian and Joel Miller in The Last of Us had produced something specific and overwhelming: a global, devoted, intensely affectionate internet culture organized around Pedro Pascal as the ultimate protective father figure.

Bella Ramsey, asked about this phenomenon in a June 2023 Vanity Fair interview, said something that was — by the standards of celebrity commentary — remarkably candid and protective.

“I very much played into it at the beginning, but now I’m worried it’s gone too far. I don’t know whether he’s still loving it; I need to ask him.”

And then: “He’s a global phenomenon as he should be, because he’s pretty spectacular.”

What Bella was articulating — without quite naming it directly — is something that goes beyond concern about a meme. It is the specific protective instinct of someone who knows the real person well enough to worry that the label is flattening them. The “internet daddy” construct is affectionate and harmless and also, in its way, reductive — it takes a performer with three decades of craft and a filmography that spans Game of Thrones, Narcos, Almodóvar, and now Marvel, and reduces him to a single, viral, vaguely thirsty concept.

Bella, who had spent months filming beside him, who had told him to breathe on set, who had seen him anxious and uncertain and working through the specific difficulty of a demanding role — did not want that person to be only the meme. “You’re so much more,” she told him, directly. “I want to protect him from that whole joke.”

“I want to protect him from that whole joke. You’re so much more.” — Bella Ramsey to Pedro Pascal. The daughter, protecting the father. The 19-year-old, protecting the 47-year-old. As usual in this friendship.

The “anxiety” moment — and what it reveals about both of them

The detail that most clearly illuminates the Pedro-Bella dynamic is the smallest one. On set — filming the most emotionally demanding scenes of what would become one of the most acclaimed television performances of the decade — PEDRO PASCAL would sometimes get anxious. Not just the hand-on-chest, manageable anxiety he has described in other contexts. The specific anxiety of a performer who cares deeply about getting it right and is acutely aware of what the stakes are.

And in those moments, BELLA RAMSEY — who was 19 years old at the time, who was filming her own emotionally demanding work as Ellie, who had her own experiences of anxiety to manage — would tell him to breathe. “It’s okay. You are doing a great job.”

This is not a dynamic you script. It is not something you engineer in a table read or a chemistry test. It is what happens when two people, who happen to have the right temperaments and the right kind of care for each other, find themselves in a situation that is difficult in similar ways — and discover, without planning it, that they are the right person to help the other through it.

A 47-year-old man being told to breathe by a 19-year-old. The most decorated supporting father figure in television learning, on the set of a show where he plays a father, that he is sometimes the one who needs looking after. And finding that the person doing the looking after is the young woman he is supposed to be protecting on screen.

What “linked souls” actually means

In June 2025, PEDRO PASCAL sent BELLA RAMSEY a card. In it, he called her “my blessing” and said the two of them were “linked souls.” Bella shared the card publicly — not because she was trying to generate content, but because she understood that this particular truth needed to be visible.

The phrase “linked souls” does not map neatly onto conventional descriptions of friendship. It is not quite siblings. Not quite parent and child. Not quite colleagues or friends in the ordinary sense. It is something that emerges from a specific kind of shared experience — the experience of spending months inside some of the most emotionally difficult material either of them had filmed, and finding that the person beside you was somehow the right person to be there.

Pedro Pascal called Bella his blessing. She called him hers. And the age gap — 28 years — that might have made this friendship feel asymmetrical or complicated simply does not appear to function that way. They are, by every account and by every visible piece of evidence, genuinely equal in this relationship. Both look after the other. Both worry about the other. Both have said, in public and on the record, that the other person is one of the important ones.

On screen, Joel Miller is the protector and Ellie is the protected. Off screen, these roles rotate freely, depending on who needs what on any given day. The daughter tells the father to breathe. The father calls the daughter his blessing. The 19-year-old protects the 47-year-old from a meme. The 47-year-old places his hand on his chest in a crowded room and the 19-year-old mirrors the gesture back to him.

Linked souls. That is the right word for it. And the linked-ness runs in both directions.

“Bella Ramsey is my blessing. We are linked souls.” — Pedro Pascal, June 2025. The father, to the daughter who was also his father. Two linked souls. Going in both directions. Always.