What Pedro Pascal Said About 'Baby Yoda' That Made Him Cry in Front of a Crowd
For seven years, Pedro Pascal played a bounty hunter who never showed his face. When he finally had to speak about what that character meant to him, he couldn't keep a straight one.
At a fan celebration in Mexico City on April 26, Pascal took the stage for a Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu promotional panel alongside director Jon Favreau. Speaking about the journey from streaming series to feature film, Pascal described watching Star Wars in movie theaters as a child with his family, how those experiences shaped him, and how he always hoped that Din Djarin and Grogu would someday make it to the big screen. After shifting to Spanish to address the crowd directly, he paused, wiped away tears, and stood there for a moment while the audience erupted into cheers and began chanting his name. He then blew a kiss to the fans before composing himself.
'As soon as I saw this, I knew that it would be a new authorship of a streaming experience,' Pascal said of the original Disney+ series, per The Hollywood Reporter. 'But I always had a dream in my heart that it would be on a big screen because that's how I was developed as a child. I went to the movie theater so much with my family, and I saw the Star Wars movies on the big screen.'
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The film, directed by Favreau and opening in theaters May 22, is the first theatrical Star Wars release since The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. It follows Din Djarin and Grogu as they work with the fledgling New Republic to track Imperial war criminals, with Sigourney Weaver and Jeremy Allen White joining the cast. Favreau has described the movie as a coming-of-age story, one where Grogu, now a Mandalorian apprentice with growing abilities, steps into a much larger world. For Favreau, three years to make a two-hour film after producing annual eight-episode seasons was a different kind of creative challenge: bigger sets, larger action sequences, and for the first time in the franchise, extended scenes with Pascal's face fully on screen.
Pascal has spoken in several interviews about what it felt like to read the feature script for the first time. 'When they locked me in a room and let me read the script for The Mandalorian and Grogu, I felt that,' he told Fandango, describing the sensation of true cinematic adventure he remembered from childhood. 'And then being on set, what I saw was the kind of thing that made my mouth drop when I was a kid.'
The press tour continued through Europe, with Pascal, Weaver, and Favreau appearing at a fan celebration in Berlin on May 4 and a Paris premiere event on May 5. Pre-sale tracking currently projects a potential $100 million opening weekend in North America. Clips of Pascal's emotional moment in Mexico City circulated widely online, drawing responses from longtime fans who said it captured what the show has meant to them, a slow-burn story about an unlikely father and son that became the emotional heart of the Star Wars universe. That is the feeling Pascal has been carrying into every stop on the press tour, and, likely, the one audiences will be carrying into theaters on May 22.
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This story was originally published May 8, 2026 at 4:42 AM.