Pedro Pascal is inescapable this year.
If you’re heading to the theater this weekend, you’ve got your pick of neo-Western Eddington, rom-com Materialists, and superhero flick Fantastic Four: First Steps, all starring Pascal. Or you could fire up your TV and watch him in The Last of Us. Soon, you’ll be able to fire up HBO Max and see a little-seen action-comedy starring Pascal that released earlier this year.
The anthology film Freaky Tales, released earlier this April, is a series of four vignettes set during real historical events in Oakland’s history in the year 1987 at the same places that they occurred in real life. In a Quentin Tarantino-esque spin, however, the events play out in various ways that don’t exactly match real life—some segments lean horror, some of them are sci-fi.
The wacky movie boasts an ensemble cast, with Pascal starring but several other big names popping up in each segment, including Tom Hanks, Ben Mendelsohn, Angus Cloud, Jay Ellis, Marshawn Lynch, singer Normani, former Warriors player Sleepy Floyd (it is an Oakland movie, after all), rapper Too Short, and plenty more off-the-wall cameos.
While the film was barely released in theaters and subsequently didn’t see much of a box office return, it was critically acclaimed and sports a 74% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the official consensus reading “Bold, funny, and overall entertaining, Freaky Tales is a vibrantly well-acted period piece that makes up in style what it lacks in narrative substance.”
Freaky Tales will stream on HBO Max starting August 9.