Ever since he showed up as Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones, Pedro Pascal’s rise to stardom has been pretty fun to see, because he’s just good in basically everything he’s in, even if that thing itself is a hot mess. And as the star of both The Mandalorian and HBO’s new prestige hit The Last of Us, it’s clear that folks wanna see Pedro Pascal be a gruff gunslinging mentor, which makes Saturday Night Live’s newest skit kind of perfect.
Pascal hosted last night’s episode, and one of the skits had him play Mario in a prestige version of Nintendo’s Mario Kart series. Instead of escorting Ellie across the country, he’s got to take Princess Peach (Chloe Fineman) across Rainbow Road as Bowser (Kenan Thompson) hunts her down. Yes, it’s literally a Nintendo reskin of Last of Us, right down to explaining the Goombas as being sentient fungus, but it’s also pretty funny, and just goofy enough to work.
Seeing the Mario cast reimagined as “complex, dramatic HBO characters” is pretty funny—”complex” for Toad and Yoshi (Bowen Yang) just means “I’m bisexual”—and it helps that Pascal as Mario is...actually pretty good? He doesn’t do a goofy accent, but he’s basically playing him like he would Joel and being completely serious about it. (His “It’s-a me, Mario” is probably the best dramatic version we’re ever going to get of that line.) Maybe in addition to that animated movie coming in a couple of months, Nintendo could get to work on a live-action Mario movie where he’s Mario and Charlie Day is Luigi? Perhaps we could also get him to pull double duty as Wario.
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