Several stars turned out to see the fresh West End production of Evita, starring Rachel Zegler as Eva Perón, in its first official performance on Tue
Several stars turned out to see the fresh West End production of Evita, starring Rachel Zegler as Eva Perón, in its first official performance on Tuesday—including Keanu Reeves, Pedro Pascal and Sarah Paulson. The latter two came together, making affectionate gestures while posing on the red carpet. It’s a natural state for Pascal and Paulson to be in: their great friendship was forged more than 30 years ago, before either one became a household name.
Sarah Paulson y Pedro Pascal en el photocall de Evita en Londres este pasado martesMaja Smiejkowska – PA Images/Getty Images
Paulson and Pascal, both 50, met when they were still teenagers in New York in the early 1990s. Pascal had moved east from California to study at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and Paulson had lived in the city since she was a child. The first friend he made at NYU had gone to school with Paulson. Soon, as Pascal noted during a joint Interview magazine interview last year, he became a member of Paulson’s inner circle.
The friends adopted the habit of going to the movies as a group. After a screening of the Jeff Bridges film Fearless, Pascal and Paulson remembered in another Interview story published in 2014, they went to the park and happened to see Woody Harrelson.
“We were the two people who knew exactly who he was and fanned out a little bit,” said Pascal. “Nobody else cared. We had our little celebrity sighting moment and that, in retrospect, was our first step towards bonding. Which cut to, I’m pretty sure that night, drinking 40s, me being on Romi’s shoulders running down Fifth Avenue, and getting knocked down by a cabbie.
Sarah Paulson y Pedro Pascal en Nueva York en 2005.Brad Barket/Getty Images
“No one was more fun,” than Pascal, Paulson recently told Vanity Fair. “But he was also…sad. There’s a well of pain that lives right behind his eyes that he’s never tried to hide from, and I think it’s what makes him so translucent as an actor. It was just magnetic for me as a young person and still is today.”
Paulson’s career began to take off well before Pascal’s did. In 1994, a year after they met, she already made her Broadway debut and appeared in an episode of Law and Order. In 1995 she shared the bill with Kathleen Turner in a made-for-TV movie, and in 1997 she made her big-screen debut with the independent thriller Levitation. In 2011, she teamed up with Ryan Murphy for American Horror Story, launching into a fresh level of success. “However hard those years may have been to an outsider who knows you, it was like watching a rocket,” Pascal told Interview in 2024. “It was like, ‘She’s making it happen.’”
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