The Two Pedro Pascals: How Latino Identity Gets Bought and Sold in Hollywood

Pedro Pascal in a Corona ad and as Reed Richards in Fantastic Four (2025)

When Pedro Pascal raises a frosty Corona bottle in that now-famous Craig Gillespie commercial, saying, with his fourth-wall-breaking gaze, "bienvenidos a la vida más fina" with flawless pronunciation and a knowing smile, he's doing something Jessica Alba could never have done during her Fantastic Four years: he's getting paid to be Latino.

Pedro Pascal as the Everyman Latino

In the Corona universe, Pascal moves through the world, with a dancer enticing him to shed his stuffy goofiness in favor of his beach charisma and easy confidence, his effortless bilingual charm, his cultural authority unquestioned. The spot works precisely because he's Latino and the audience knows it. He's the guy you want at your family barbecue, the one who knows how to live well. Hell, he makes me want to grab a Corona and head to the nearest shoreline. Snoop Dogg and Eli Manning could never because, for all their talents and accomplishments, being Latino is not among them.

Stretching Latinidad, or?

Yet when Pascal walks onto the The Fantastic Four: First Steps set and becomes the legendary Reed Richards, something fascinating—and troubling—happens. Suddenly Pascal can't be that confident, culturally grounded Latino man anymore. Not because the character is different, but because Hollywood has put Pascal in an impossible bind: he can't be the traditional superhero leader without invoking the machismo stereotype that Latino men supposedly embody and, thus, must avoid. So instead, he becomes something else entirely—hesitant, contemplative, almost passive—while Sue Storm, played by white British actress Vanessa Kirby, emerges as the film's true hero.

This isn't simply about representation. The situation reveals how even well-intentioned attempts to avoid stereotypes can create new forms of diminishment, especially when they strip away cultural context that might provide alternative models of masculinity and character development.

Pascal's dual performance reveals Hollywood's fundamental confusion about Latino men: when his heritage is marketable, he gets to be confidently masculine; when it needs to disappear for universal appeal, his masculinity gets neutered along with his culture.

Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards

The most revealing moment in The Fantastic Four: First Steps isn't when Pascal stretches his body—it's when he doesn't stretch his authority. Reed Richards has always been the team's leader in the comics, the patriarch of Marvel's "First Family." The character has traditionally been portrayed as the decisive genius who guides Earth's greatest and, in many ways, foundational superhero team through cosmic threats—here, the team is Earth 828's only superheroes, so venerated that almost the entire planet gives them complete confidence. (At least one citizen of Latveria isn't a fan.)

There is such naivety in Earth 828 that it's both wholesome and nostalgic, and Reed Richards is trusted like no planetary leader before and certainly not since. But Pascal's version spends much of the film wracked with doubt, absorbed in worst-case scenarios, hesitating when action is required. After the Galactus encounter, Richards is the spokesman when words have failed to express his fear that, this time, there may be no way out. He—and Sue—have a Sophie's Choice type decision to make.

Pascal himself described his approach to Richards as channeling someone who "can't help but always imagine the worst possible outcome for his family."Director Matt Shakman described Reed as potentially "the smartest person on the planet," yet this intellectual superiority doesn't translate into commanding and confident leadership. Instead, Reed becomes the team's anxious strategist, reticent to admit he's already visited possibilities Sue can't even imagine, for though he is always calculating, rarely is Pascal's Reed decisive. Instead, he waits for Sue to act, which then mobilizes his own urgency to get out of his own head and do something.

Latinx Displacement

In isolation, this characterization makes sense. Reed Richards is so brilliant, of course he'd think through every possibility like a human calculator, seeing every possible outcome as Doctor Strange did in Avengers: Infinity War, through calculating rather than divination. And showing a male character who leads through emotional intelligence rather than physical dominance could certainly be refreshing. The problem arises when you juxtapose this version of masculinity with Sue Storm's increasingly central role as the heart of the film.

Kirby's Sue doesn't just match Reed intellectually—she surpasses him in decisive action. Where he falters at a press conference to explain the implication of their decision to deny Galactus what he wants, Sue acts by addressing the gathering mob in her best Madonna and Child tableau in one of her many standout moments. While he's calculating possibilities, she's making the hard choices—Reed's plan is executed by Sue's sheer, raw, maternal power and determination in Times Square.

While Galactus pulls Reed like a human Stretch Armstrong toy (his powers literally making him a rubbery plaything at times), Sue's wielding invisible force fields that can level buildings and cloak the Excelsior between birth contractions! The comics have long established Sue as the most powerful member of the team, but here her strength doesn't complement Reed's leadership in this film—it supplants it.

Big Tent Hierarchies

If a white actor played Reed Richards, this dynamic might read as progressive: the brilliant but neurotic scientist whose competent wife keeps him grounded. Think Tony Stark's relationship with Pepper Potts, where his chaos is balanced by her competence, but his heroic authority remains unquestioned in that case. But with Pascal in the role, it creates an uncomfortable resonance with stereotypes about Latino men being either hypermasculine threats or, when that's avoided, somehow inadequate compared to white women's competence.

The film inadvertently creates a hierarchy where the Latino man's thoughtfulness and reason read as weakness while the white woman's assertiveness reads as strength. While this isn't necessarily the intention, it's the unavoidable result when you strip away cultural context that might ground Pascal's more collaborative approach in something substantive.

Familismo

The cruel irony is that Pascal's Reed Richards embodies values that align perfectly with Latino cultural concepts like familismo—the framework emphasizing collective wellbeing and collaborative decision-making over individual heroism.Research consistently shows that familismo serves as a protective factor for Latino mental health and family cohesion, representing collectivist values often contrasted with American individualism.

With the conceit that the film is located in another Earth—one that is new even among the multitude of Earths in Marvel Comics—there is all the opportunity to lean into this pluralism. Latino masculinity traditions include respeto (respect for others), confianza (building trust through relationships), and educación (moral character beyond formal education)—all of which might have grounded Reed's intellectual leadership in cultural authority rather than neurotic hesitation.

Instead, because the film strips away any cultural context that the audience knows is embodied in the actor himself, Pascal's more collaborative leadership style just reads as... less. Less decisive than Sue, less commanding than traditional superhero patriarchs, less certain of his own authority. Even Johnny Storm—usually the one portrayed as less "responsible"—has to take charge and become a linguistic code breaker because Reed has to work things out on his own. The film accidentally creates what it was trying to avoid: a sense that the Latino man isn't quite up to the job.

Emasculating Latinx Masculinities

Compare this to Pascal's Corona persona, where his cultural groundedness, his ability to be silly and stylish at the same time, allows him to be confidently masculine without being threatening. In those ads, he navigates social situations with ease and authority, comfortable in his own skin, clearly the kind of person people want to be around. His masculinity doesn't need to prove itself through dominance because it's rooted in cultural authenticity.

"How does Pascal stop being Latino when the director yells, 'Action'? Perhaps more to the point, how could he stop?"

Pascal spoke explicitly about]{.underline} the "cultural significance as far as my Latino roots are concerned" and his experience living "an English and Spanish-speaking life." And while one may argue that roles often demand that actors temporarily set aside who they are, it is not so easy for actors who embody a visibly coded identity, such as race, gender, or ethnicity.

How does Pascal stop being Latino when the director yells, "Action"? Perhaps more to the point, how could he stop?

The difference is stark: when Pascal identifies as specifically Latino, he can embody a relaxed, confident, and attractive masculinity. Despite his character's name, Pascal's turn as Joel Miller in The Last of Us is coded as almost undeniably Latino. Together with his brother, Tommy, played by Gabriel Luna, Joel cannot help but be encoded with Pascal's Latino heritage.

But when Pascal has to be culturally neutral, as in The Fantastic Four, Hollywood doesn't know how to make him strong without rendering him as stereotypical, so they make him a watered-down version of what he might have been instead.

Latinx Subtraction

Pascal's dual performance ultimately reveals something troubling about how Hollywood has evolved and its inability to wrangle with the fallout zone that is the stereotype. The industry has learned to value Latino identity as a marketing tool while remaining suspicious of it as a source of character strength.

Pascal can be paid to represent "modern Latino" authenticity when selling cervezas "hecho en Mexico," but he can't embody traditional heroic authority when saving the universe—not without cultural context that might ground his leadership in something more substantial than nervous intellect.

"It's progress that still feels like diminishment, inclusion that requires self-erasure."

What we have here is a particularly insidious form of representation: Pascal gets to "break barriers" by playing Marvel's premier genius, but only by embodying a version of Latino masculinity that seems somehow inadequate compared to white female competence. It's progress that still feels like diminishment, inclusion that requires self-erasure.

The tragedy is that Latino cultures offer rich alternative models of masculinity that could strengthen superhero narratives. Familismo, community leadership, emotional intelligence, collaborative decision-making—these values could provide Reed Richards with cultural authority that doesn't depend on individual dominance or emotional inadequacy.

But accessing those models would require acknowledging Pascal's cultural identity in ways that might complicate the film's universal appeal, and right-wing culture warriors are salivating at the chance to point at some new version of a long-established trope or character and brand it as "woke"—to change its identity composition for the sake of variety. So instead, we get representation by subtraction: the Latino actor who can reach the stars only by leaving his cultural identity firmly planted on Earth.

"So, we went from 100% white to 75% white, but Pascal is effectively transformed as white in all but appearance."

Reports that Marvel president Kevin Feige worried the Fantastic Four cast would be "too white" before Pascal's addition suggest awareness of optics rather than engagement with authenticity. So, we went from 100% white to 75% white, but Pascal is effectively transformed as white in all but appearance. The studio gains diversity points without risking the commercial safety of culturally neutral narratives. As far as the characters are concerned, Reed Richards is just as white on Earth 828 as he is on Earth 616.

Brown Paradox

And so, when Pascal's Reed Richards stretches toward the cosmos in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, he embodies a peculiarly American paradox: a Latino man can be the most intelligent person in the universe who can master teleportation and understands the consequences of time dilation, but only if he's somehow less commanding, less assertive than everyone around him. The film's agonized attempt to avoid stereotypes creates new problems, inadvertently suggesting that Latino masculinity needs to be diminished to be acceptable.

"Too Latino for universal appeal, too universal to be authentically Latino, and somehow never quite allowed to be both confidently masculine and culturally specific at the same time."

Until Hollywood learns that cultural authenticity might actually strengthen rather than limit Latino characters, actors like Pascal will continue navigating this impossible terrain: too Latino for universal appeal, too universal to be authentically Latino, and somehow never quite allowed to be both confidently masculine and culturally specific at the same time. Even the smartest man in the Marvel universe, it turns out, can't solve an equation that the industry itself keeps changing.

The formula exists, however. Corona's marketing team proved as much. But in the broader universe of American entertainment, letting Latino men be both competent and culturally grounded remains a calculation too complex for even Hollywood's super-geniuses to solve.