Backstage at Chanel’s runway show last October, moments before she hit the catwalk, Lux Pascal was feeling like that old Lady Gaga interview clip: no sleep, bus, club, ‘nother club—especially the “no sleep” part. She had been flying back and forth across the Atlantic, rehearsing for her Off-Broadway debut in New York while dashing all over Paris for various Fashion Week engagements, the crown jewel being that night at Chanel. Soon, she would step out onto that runway wearing clothes from newly appointed creative director Matthieu Blazy’s debut collection for the house.
Despite her exhausted state, the rising actress and model felt electric. “I don’t think I’d ever been more awake in my life,” she tells me a few months later as she recounts the scene between omakase courses at New York’s DOMODOMO, dressed not in Chanel—save for her purse—but in a black zip-up hoodie and a pair of loose-fitting blue jeans. “I was in the rush of it all, you know? I could feel my heart beating so fast. My feet were on fire. Even if I’d wanted to stop and breathe, I couldn’t.”
For the show, Chanel had transformed the Grand Palais, hanging massive glowing planets from the ceiling like cosmic Christmas baubles. The models, by contrast, projected a grounded indifference to the grandeur around them, looking as unbothered, unflappable, and focused as women you’d pass on the street, going somewhere only they know. “Matthieu told us that the woman who walks this runway is a woman of the world,” she says. “She’s walking towards something, and she needs to have a certain lack of self-awareness, or maybe a lack of self-consciousness, which I thought was such a beautiful concept. As a woman, I found that very freeing. We’re constantly aware that we’re being seen.”
"Acting is playing. Why wouldn't I want to play for a living?"
Halloween also provided her with an excellent opportunity every year to develop her character work. “I was really serious about it,” she says. “It wasn’t as simple as, ‘What costume am I going to wear?’ I wanted to embody a character.” Her favorite Halloween costume she ever wore was Morticia from The Addams Family when she was five years old. “I wore these fake fingers—the ones with the red pointy nails and shit,” she says. “I did not want to take them off. One of them fell off, and I remember feeling like, ‘Oh, god! I’m breaking character!’ Opening candy was impossible.”
Her craft has evolved greatly since then—she’s graduated from two prestigious acting programs, first at Santiago’s Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and then at the Juilliard School in Manhattan—but remnants of that Halloween roleplay remain. When Pascal begins work on a new character, nailing down how they move and speak, her process often starts with what that character is wearing. In a recent Off-Broadway production of Richard II that relocated Shakespeare’s play amid the “Greed is good” upper crust of Reagan-era New York, Pascal played the Queen, opposite Michael Urie, with power dressing, resort wear, and a towering ‘80s bouffant. “It’s such a domestic part, you know? She definitely fulfills the expectations of her gender at the time,” says Pascal, who adds that she took cues from Mad Men’s Betty Draper. “January Jones is just so incredible as ‘the woman behind the man.’ How does it feel to be raised to be a beautiful object? It’s an impossible expectation.”
“Lux is electric onstage—she emits her own light, don’t bother with the spotlight!” Urie will later tell me over email. “Onstage, she’s spontaneous, dynamic, and brimming with soul.” And offstage? “Ryan Spahn, my other half, was in the play, too,” Urie recounts, “Lux would always hang out in our dressing room and drink the seltzers from our mini-fridge, but she also went to the store weekly to keep it replenished. We loved it. Every so often, our fridge would mysteriously be restocked by a phantom queen.”
Photographs by Quil Lemons Styling by Dione Davis Written by Harron Walker Hair: Blake Erik Makeup: Carolina Gonzalez using Armani Beauty Props: Carrie Hill Photo Assistants: Sam Dole, Thalia Romanos Executive Creative Producer: Cara Scott, Other Half Creative Set Producer: Lindsey Gardner Production Assistant: Maddie Galer Editor-in-Chief: Faith Xue Senior Fashion Editor: Ella O’Keeffe Designer: Sierra Cook Social Strategy Lead: Kala Herh Social Creative Lead: Natasha Sheridan
There’s a playful sort of irony to that statement, given the fact that I, a reporter-slash-total stranger, am sitting now across the table from her, staring her down. The patrons at our neighboring tables, a rotating cast of seeming first dates, also join in on the watching, sneaking glances every so often as they try to figure out who the woman being interviewed is.
For the moment, Pascal still enjoys a certain anonymity—but it feels temporary. I’m catching her in a brief sort of in-between moment of her life, and her career; a time that will likely go unwritten about on her Wikipedia page before everything changes. She closed last year with back-to-back wins—a starring role in a Netflix film, an Off-Broadway debut in a recent restaging of Richard II, and a role booked in Tom Ford’s next film—all within a few weeks of each other. And with production underway on said Tom Ford film, plus an upcoming guest spot on Ryan Murphy’s new show, The Beauty, she’s poised right now for a major breakthrough, and with it a larger spotlight. It’s something that once would have frightened her. “I hated being perceived when I was younger, so whenever I was onstage and people would look at me I would freeze,” she says. But now that she’s a bit older and wiser, she can handle their gaze, her own never faltering from the path ahead.
“Matthieu told us, ‘You’re going somewhere, you’re walking, and have fun,’” she says. “‘Is that doable?’ he asked. That felt doable.”
She could be talking about the particular difficulties of working in Hollywood as a trans woman right now; the resurgence of anti-trans politics, both in the U.S. and abroad, has had a demonstrable impact on the entertainment industry, reducing the number of opportunities, already somewhat limited, to trans actors of any gender. Or maybe she’s referring to the sacrifices she had to make as part of her move to the U.S., like leaving behind the acting career she’d started to build in Chile. “It was completely like starting over,” she says. “But I always remind myself that if I hadn’t made that decision, I would have always regretted it.”
“Nothing can scare me at this point,” she continues. “A ‘no’ isn’t going to scare me. I know I’m going somewhere. That’s just the story of my life.” Originally, Pascal had a scene in Nicole Kidman’s buzzy film, Babygirl—but found out after filming that her scene was getting cut. ““[The director Halina Reijn] wrote me the classiest email,” she says. “I saw the movie and thought, ‘Yeah, it didn’t need it.’ That movie is fucking perfect.”
Born in California and raised in her parents’ home country of Chile, Pascal tells me that she’s wanted to act for as long as she can remember. “It’s one of my earliest memories,” she says, tracing it back to her first time watching Wes Craven’s Scream. “I thought it looked so thrilling,” she says. “I wanted to feel how it felt being chased—not in a real way, of course, but I would play games like that with my brother where I would hide and he would try to look for me.”
She’s referring to Pedro Pascal, the SAG Award-winning Last of Us star who is 17 years Lux’s senior. Despite their physical distance—Pedro was living in New York as Lux grew up in Santiago—the pair have always been close. “Throughout my life, he’s always been someone I can come to with concerns,” she says. “Since my mom passed away when we were kids, my relationship with my siblings has been a major support system, almost like we’re talking to my mother through each other.”
As a child, Pascal would play games with her older brother whenever he visited home. “We’d play ‘monster,’ chasing me around the house, or play Jaws in the pool where I’d swim and he’d grab me and throw me up into the sky and back into the water again,” she says. “I always talk about that with him, how fabulous and fun it was, because he was already a working actor at the time, so our games would feel so real. That was acting, I realized. Acting is playing. Why wouldn’t I want to play for a living?”
FEBRUARY 2026
LUX PASCAL
THE RENEWAL ISSUE
"The United States is like a jungle. It feels like I’m still trying to survive here, you know?”
After reading the news in Deadline that Ford would be making the film—with a jaw-dropping cast that includes the likes of Nicholas Hoult, Thandiwe Newton, Adele, Hunter Schafer, and Colin Firth—I picked up a copy of its source material, Anne Rice’s 1982 novel of the same name. So far, it is totally thrilling—an endless sequence of sex and betrayal, drama and violence, all set between eighteenth-century Naples and Venice at the height of Italian opera. Pascal is tight-lipped on her role in the film—“It’s 100 percent sealed,” she says—but she does tell me that she’d already decided to do it before she even looked at the script. “I got a call from my management team that Tom Ford wanted to offer me a role in [the] film,” she recounts. “I think I literally blacked out. They didn’t know what the part was, but they sent me the script with a letter from him—handwritten! I think I said yes in 30 minutes. I wanted to seem profesh, so I read the script first—be cool about it, I told myself—but it was a yes based on the phone call alone. I would do whatever he wanted me to do.”The only other thing she can tell me about the film is that she recently did her fitting, though as for what her costume entails, that remains to be seen. As does so much of what comes next for Pascal, but still she’s moving forward.
“I was just talking to a friend of mine,” she says. “He lives a little outside of Santiago in a home he built himself—like, fully with his own hands, by himself. It was so shocking to me, the first time I saw it. I couldn’t believe anyone would ever be able to do that without help. I told him that, and he said, ‘Well, what you did was a lot more impressive in my eyes, leaving everyone behind and starting over by yourself.’”
“I was kind of gagged by it,” she laughs. “Because, you know what? You’re fucking right. I did that.”
In last year’s Miss Carbón—her first major project since coming out publicly as a trans woman in 2021—Pascal struck a different silhouette, strapping herself into the work uniform of Carla Antonella Rodríguez, the real-life Argentine woman who fought discrimination and harassment to become the first-ever trans miner in the Patagonia region. “The fittings were so extensive, trying to capture how she embraces herself as a woman off the clock as opposed to when she’s working,” says Pascal. “When I met her, I could instantly see her beauty and also where she’s been. She’s just a girl who’s trying to survive.”
Once the costume is fitted, Lux usually has a clear idea of how she wants to portray her character. “What’s broken about the woman I’m playing? What is her wound, and how does she want to heal?” Lux continues. “What she’s wearing is important because that is how we construct ourselves. I hate to sound super, well—duh, but it is true. We choose our clothes every day based on what ‘character’ we want to be.”
At one point during our interview, with New Year’s Eve only a fortnight behind us, I ask Pascal if she’s the kind of girl who likes to make New Year’s resolutions. “I don’t,” she says. “I have just never been the kind of person to calculate my life that way. Maybe I should, though.” She thinks for a beat. “My New Year’s resolution will be…to stop picking on myself so much. I don’t know if I’ll actually achieve it, but it’s a good thing to have in my mind.” She doesn’t elaborate on this point. She similarly, after referring to herself a couple of times as someone who’s experienced major disappointments in her life, demurs when I ask her directly what some of those disappointments are. She could be referring to the ongoing strain that stems from living so far from her home. “The culture shock was huge,” she later says when describing her move to the U.S. “My heart is there in Chile. The people that love me and know me and want the best for me are there. The United States is like a jungle. It feels like I’m still trying to survive here, you know? I’ve made wonderful relationships here, but as Dorothy says, ‘There’s no place like home.’”
I ask her if she has always been so resilient. “I used to take rejection a lot harder, but I’ve come to understand that a lot of things aren’t personal,” she says. “It’s the human condition. We think it’s always about ourselves. But people aren’t really rejecting you—they just found something else that they gravitated towards. That shit isn’t about me.” (I joke that if I ever break up with my boyfriend, I’ll be using that line.)
As for where she’d like to see herself in a year’s time, Pascal is direct, responding with no hesitation: “On a movie set, or at a film festival, talking about a movie I did.”
Perhaps she’s able to answer so concretely because she isn’t making up these hopes in real time, manifesting something from nothing like a Secret devotee might. Eight months ago, Pascal filmed Love & Chaos, an independent dark comedy from screenwriter Frederick W. Grimm about a reality show cast whose production company abandons them somewhere deep in continental Europe, so she could very well be doing press for that project. It is equally likely that she could be filming her scenes for Cry to Heaven, the recently-announced, much-anticipated film from the acclaimed fashion designer and award-winning director Tom Ford.
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