His Father Was a Celebrated Doctor. Then Came the Scandal. Then His Mother Was Gone. And Pedro Pascal Changed His Name — and Never Fully Explained Why.

The complete family story that PEDRO PASCAL has spoken about only in fragments — his father JOSÉ BALMACEDA, the 1995 UC IRVINE FERTILITY SCANDAL, the return to Chile, the loss of his mother, and the name he chose to carry forward. Told carefully. Told fully. For the first time in one place.
There are parts of PEDRO PASCAL‘s story that he tells freely and often — the Chilean refugee parents, the years of struggle, the Buffy residual check, Sarah Paulson’s per diem, the park bench in Lucerne. He is generous with the texture of his own experience in a way that very few famous people are.

And there are parts he has spoken about only in fragments. In a 2017 interview with Chilean publication La Tercera. In his SNL monologue, briefly and carefully. In answers to questions that require him to navigate complicated territory with the specific care of someone who has thought about it for a long time and still has not fully resolved it.

His father. The scandal. The return to Chile. His mother’s death. And the name he chose, when everything that followed had settled into something he could live with.

This is that story. Told carefully. With the respect it deserves. And with the understanding that the only person who fully knows what it means is PEDRO PASCAL himself — who has chosen to share pieces of it, and has chosen, with equal deliberateness, to keep the rest.

“It was a period of great fear. I grew up with my family in the U.S., and one day to the next, there was no longer a home to return to. Suddenly, the idea of the safe nest had disappeared.” — Pedro Pascal, La Tercera, 2017

The beginning — who José Balmaceda was

JOSÉ BALMACEDA RIERA was born in Santiago, Chile in 1948. He studied medicine at Catholic University Medical School, graduating in 1974. He met VERÓNICA PASCAL URETA — who was related to the influential Allende family, the cousin of a prominent opposition leader during the Pinochet years — and they married. Together they were political progressives in a country that had just come under military rule.

In 1975, when PEDRO PASCAL was nine months old, the family’s situation became dangerous. José had helped conceal and treat someone who had been injured during opposition activities. When that person was arrested, the family was named to the authorities. They fled — first into hiding, then to Denmark for asylum, then eventually to the United States.

In America, José Balmaceda rebuilt his career. He became a reproductive endocrinologist — a fertility specialist — and by the mid-1980s he was working at the University of California, Irvine’s Center for Reproductive Health. He developed a reputation as one of the leading figures in his field. He was invited to present his research internationally. The family settled in California. Pedro and his older sister Javiera grew up there. It was, by Pedro’s own description, a privileged life — a safe nest in a country that had given the family refuge when they needed it most.

1995 — the scandal and what it meant

In February 1995, allegations began to emerge from UC Irvine’s Center for Reproductive Health. The accusations were serious: that doctors at the clinic — including JOSÉ BALMACEDA, along with colleagues Ricardo Asch and Sergio Stone — had performed egg and embryo transfers without patient consent. In some cases, eggs harvested from one patient had been implanted in another woman, without either woman knowing. The clinic also faced allegations of tax fraud — that significant cash income had not been reported.

The patients whose eggs and embryos were involved described the experience in terms that are difficult to read even now. One woman said she had never consented to give her eggs to anyone. Another couple had spent $35,000 — including a second mortgage and borrowed family money — on treatment at the clinic, only to discover that the wife’s eggs had been used for someone else. “They couldn’t steal anything more valuable to us,” the husband said.

UC Irvine’s fertility clinic closed in June 1995. Investigations began. JOSÉ BALMACEDA denied the accusations — he claimed the misappropriation of eggs was primarily the responsibility of colleague Asch, and that he had been misrepresented by university administrators. He distributed letters making this case to the college of medicine.

In September 1995, José visited his mother in Chile — and did not return to the United States. He was subsequently indicted in absentia on twenty counts of mail fraud. He was labeled a fugitive. His faculty salary was terminated. The family — José, Verónica, and the two younger children, including Lux — relocated to Chile.

Pedro Pascal, in a 2017 interview with La Tercera, described the period with unusual directness: “It was a period of great fear. I grew up with my family in the U.S., and one day to the next, there was no longer a home to return to. Suddenly, the idea of the safe nest had disappeared. It was shocking because, in the previous years, I took for granted the privileged life we had in California.” He did not elaborate on his feelings about his father’s role in those events. He has never done so publicly. That silence is its own kind of statement — and its own kind of privacy that deserves respect.

The years that followed — separation, loss, and the name

After the family’s return to Chile, PEDRO PASCAL‘s parents separated. The specific reasons and circumstances of that separation are not something Pedro has discussed in detail publicly — and this account will not speculate beyond what is known.

VERÓNICA PASCAL URETA — the child psychologist, the woman from the Allende-connected family, the woman who had fled a dictatorship with her nine-month-old son and helped build a life in California — died in February 1999. She was 46 years old.

Pedro has spoken about her death only briefly and carefully. In the La Tercera interview: “For me, it was the hardest time. I haven’t been able to, and I don’t know if I can one day, completely reconcile how my parents separated and the tragedy that came after that separation. The circumstances of my mother’s death made it very hard for us to keep her memory as the person she was.”

He has not elaborated further. That sentence — “the circumstances of my mother’s death” — is the only public language he has used. It carries weight. It asks to be taken seriously. And it will be taken seriously here, without addition or interpretation beyond what Pedro himself has offered.

After his mother’s death, PEDRO PASCAL changed his professional name. He had been credited in his earliest work as Pedro Balmaceda — his father’s surname. He became Pedro Pascal — his mother’s surname. He has said that he changed it to honor her. That is the full explanation he has given. It is also, in its way, complete.

2022 — the return and the plea

For nearly three decades, the legal case against JOSÉ BALMACEDA remained technically open but functionally unresolved. He had continued his medical career in Chile — working at one of Santiago’s most prestigious private clinics, serving as director of the Latin American Assisted Reproduction Network, giving interviews in which he maintained his position on what had happened in California.

In 2022 — the same year Pedro Pascal was preparing for the fame that The Last of Us would bring — José Balmaceda appeared in a federal courthouse in Santa Ana, California. He signed a plea agreement. He admitted to under-reporting his taxes in 1991 and 1992 as part of a scheme in which he and other doctors had taken cash from clients without reporting the income. He was released on a $750,000 bond.

The plea addressed the financial charges only. The ethical questions — the women whose eggs were used without consent, the families who discovered unexpected biological relatives, the patients who described it as the theft of the most valuable thing they had — were never subject to criminal accountability, because no law at the time adequately covered what had occurred. UC Irvine paid over $23 million in settlements to affected families. The doctors were never charged for the egg transfers themselves.

Pedro Pascal has not spoken publicly about his father’s 2022 plea. He has been photographed with his father — including in London in late 2024 alongside Lux. The relationship appears to have continued. The full nature of it, and what Pedro thinks and feels about all of it, remains — as he has chosen — his own.

What Pedro has said — and what he has not

The most honest thing PEDRO PASCAL has said about this chapter of his family history is the simplest: that it was a period of great fear. That the safe nest disappeared. That the circumstances of his mother’s death made it hard to keep her memory as the person she was. That he took her name so she would be carried forward.

He has not said more. He has been asked, in interviews, about his father — and has navigated those questions with the specific careful warmth of someone who loves a person and also holds complicated feelings about them and has decided that the public arena is not the place to resolve either of those things.

This is, in the end, the most Pedro Pascal possible approach to something genuinely difficult. He does not perform resolution he has not achieved. He does not pretend a complicated thing is simple. He holds the complication — with the same hand that he places on his chest when the anxiety hits — and keeps going.

His father is a real person with a real and complicated history. His mother was a real person who mattered enormously. The name Pedro Pascal carries both of them — the one he took, and the weight of the circumstances under which he took it. Every time anyone calls him by that name, every time it appears on a poster or a credit or a headline, it is doing the work he intended it to do.

Honoring her. Carrying her. Making it so that the world, which now knows him, knows something of her too.

“The circumstances of my mother’s death made it very hard for us to keep her memory as the person she was.” — Pedro Pascal, La Tercera, 2017. He took her name so the memory could survive differently. It has. It does.