If you, like the rest of the internet, have dramatically cannonballed into what I like to call The Pascal Rationale — finding ways to add a little Pedro Pascal into all aspects of your day — then you’re in good company. As far as living goes these days, .
If you’ve watched every episode of three times despite the amount of face-leaking it provokes, if you’ve trawled TikTok and YouTube for early clips of Pascal in Buffy and Touched By An Angel, if you’ve been watching Narcos for years and smugly lecture your mates on this fact at brunch, if you clutch your heart and scramble for your phone when someone tells you they haven’t seen the …I have news for you.
Pedro Pascal read an audiobook once.
Yep, in 2008, years before Pascal was dazzling viewers with his eye-popping performance as aka the Red Viper on , showing Grogu the way on , or investigating Pablo Escobar as Javier Peña in , he narrated an audiobook called , the first novel by filmmaker and graphic novelist Leopoldo Gout.
Running for seven hours and 55 minutes of Pascal’s atmospheric, velvety voice in scary story mode, Ghost Radio is the tale of exactly that: a radio call-in show hosted by lugubrious presenter Joaquin, wherein callers offer up their supernatural experiences. When he’s not supressing the tragic events of his past, Joaquin co-hosts the show from the dimly lit station with his girlfriend Alondra, who knows a crapload about folklore. He’s also joined by his sound engineer, Watts, and the three of them run their show for their insomniac, macabre smattering of listeners. But when the show goes mainstream, Joaquin gets pulled further into the nightmarish tales people are calling in with and weird shit starts happening.
Pascal’s audio performance is predictably excellent, bringing the radio broadcasting horror to life. It’s no easy task performing an audiobook, especially fiction, and engaging the listener without making me personally cringe. But Pascal’s a pro, selling every character and scene of dialogue in Gout’s slow-paced story, which jumps all over the place from past to present, digging into Joaquin’s past and the tragedies there. Gout spends ample time discussing different types of music through Joaquin’s best friend Gabriel, and I’d personally listen to Pascal describing Pixies and Dead Kennedys all day.
Gout received decent praise for the book, including who said, “Ghost Radio reminded me of early Stephen King….The story sticks with you long after you’ve finished the final page.”
It’s always a treat listening to a famous actor reading an audiobook — Jake Gyllenhaal reading The Great Gatsby, Gabrielle Union reading Dispossessed, Meryl Streep reading Heartburn, Chadwick Boseman reading Upstate, Kate Winslet reading Thérèse Raquin, Samira Wiley reading The Color Purple, Claire Danes reading The Handmaid’s Tale, Reese Witherspoon reading Go Set a Watchman, Thandiwe Newton reading Jane Eyre, Lin-Manuel Miranda reading Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. That’s not even counting the full cast readings available. Listening to famous actors read these books right into your earholes has an element of radio plays. And now, you can add Pascal to the list.
Sounds like your next read tah mah.