What Pedro Pascal reads: 10 of the actor’s favourite books, from Dostoyevsky to Toni Morrison

Often mistaken for a sweet animal fable, Watership Down is actually a survival epic. In this novel—which has been turned into a classic animated film in 1978, and remade for Netflix in 2018—a group of rabbits flee the destruction of their warren and face brutality, authoritarianism and exile. It’s a story about resistance and community told with surprisingly political undertones. Pedro Pascal has spoken about how gruelling it was to read as a child, and how it left an emotional mark.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is perhaps the most well-known of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels, which has lately been turned into a lush drama on Netflix. The Latin American classic chronicles seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo. Mixing folklore, revolution and existential crisis, García Márquez captures how history repeats itself in cycles of love and loss. Pascal has praised its poetic treatment of grief and memory, echoing his own interest in generational trauma and the surreal.

Set in Soviet Moscow, The Master and Margarita is a dizzying novel that follows the Devil as he wreaks havoc alongside a talking cat named Behemoth. The narrative shifts between absurdist satire and a retelling of Pontius Pilate’s encounter with Christ. Pedro Pascal named it a favourite, and it fits: the book is chaotic, political and metaphysical, like much of his best work.

J.D. Salinger’s two-part novella Franny & Zooey is a family drama steeped in spiritual crisis and intellectual paralysis. Franny, a college student, breaks down under the weight of academic pretension and existential doubt. Her brother Zooey offers philosophical comfort in the form of sharp dialogue and Salinger’s signature stillness. Pascal has cited it as one of his most formative reads.

Charlotte Brontë’s gothic bildungsroman traces the life of Jane Eyre from orphanhood to self-possessed adulthood. It challenges Victorian gender roles and moral codes through a protagonist who refuses to compromise her autonomy, even when it costs her comfort and love. Pedro Pascal reportedly counts it among his favourites, likely drawn to its emotional restraint and moral clarity.

Set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, Thomas Mann’s philosophical novel The Magic Mountain follows a young man whose brief visit stretches into years of isolation and debate. Through dialogues on time, illness and mortality, the book becomes an allegory for Europe before the First World War. Pascal mentioned it as a “meditation on death”, revealing his interest in intellectual terrain as much as dramatic one.

A brutal, lyrical exploration of race, sexuality and emotional failure in 1950s New York, Another Country by James Baldwin weaves between Black and white characters navigating desire and alienation in a city that promises freedom but offers little refuge. Pedro Pascal has spoken admiringly of Baldwin’s work, and this particular novel’s emotional rawness mirrors his own performances at their most vulnerable.

Beloved centres on an escaped enslaved woman haunted—literally and figuratively—by the trauma of her past. The Bluest Eye follows a young Black girl who believes her life would be better if she had blue eyes. In both books, Toni Morrison writes with unflinching clarity about generational violence, identity and survival. Pedro Pascal has frequently recommended her work, citing its emotional and cultural gravity.

A hybrid of memoir, neuroscience and cultural history, The Urge: Our History of Addiction examines how society has framed addiction through the centuries. It rejects moral panic in favour of compassion and science. Pascal posted it on Instagram, suggesting that his reading isn’t limited to fiction—he’s also drawn to books that dismantle stigma and interrogate human behaviour.

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