Pedro Pascal has become the latest Hollywood name to fall for Hydra, the tiny car-free island in the Saronic Gulf that has drawn film stars and artists since Sophia Loren shot Boy on a Dolphin there in 1956. The actor was spotted this week holidaying on the island with his Fantastic Four: First Steps co-star Ebon Moss-Bachrach, best known for playing Richie in The Bear, and American musician Jason Aalon Butler, frontman of the rock band Fever 333.
Pascal, 51, spent almost two decades in small television and theatre roles, working steadily but without wide recognition, before Game of Thrones changed the trajectory of his career in 2014, when he played the doomed prince Oberyn Martell. Born in Santiago, Chile, to parents who fled the country during the Pinochet regime and settled in Texas, he trained at NYU before that long stretch of minor parts. He followed Game of Thrones with a run as DEA agent Javier Peña in Narcos, and has since become one of the industry’s busiest and most recognisable actors, carrying The Mandalorian and The Last of Us as two very different versions of the same reluctant father figure, and more recently stepping into the Marvel universe as Reed Richards in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the role where his friendship with Moss-Bachrach began.
The Hydra trip only came to light by accident. A German tourist filming a beach scene for TikTok unwittingly captured Pascal and Moss-Bachrach in the background, chatting by the water in swimwear with no security in sight. It was only after the clip started circulating that viewers realised who they were looking at, and the footage quickly spread across social media and international entertainment outlets. Later footage showed Pascal walking through Hydra’s steep stone laneways in a black T-shirt before joining the group for dinner at a local restaurant, unbothered and largely unrecognised.
Pascal has not posted anything from the trip himself, so the tourist’s video remains the only record of the visit. Butler’s involvement adds a musical thread to the getaway, though nothing has been confirmed about how long the group plans to stay or whether Athens or other islands are on the itinerary.
Moss-Bachrach has previously credited Pascal with pushing the Fantastic Four cast to bond off camera, going as far as setting up a group chat to get everyone talking before production began, and the friendship formed there appears to have carried well beyond the soundstage.
Hydra itself is no stranger to famous visitors. The island banned motor vehicles by presidential decree in the 1950s, a rule that still holds today, meaning donkeys and water taxis do the work cars would elsewhere. That combination of proximity to Athens, roughly an hour by ferry from Piraeus, and enforced slowness has made it a magnet for people trying to disappear for a few days without really leaving civilisation. Leonard Cohen lived there for years and wrote some of his best-known work on the island, and it has quietly hosted actors, musicians and writers ever since, drawn by the whitewashed stone houses and a harbour that still looks much as it did seventy years ago.
For Pascal, the timing of the trip is notable. He is currently promoting Behemoth!, Tony Gilroy’s first film as director since The Bourne Legacy in 2012. Pascal plays a touring cellist who returns to Los Angeles after two decades away, in a cast that includes Olivia Wilde, Will Arnett and Eva Victor, with Searchlight Pictures positioning the film for a December release and early awards attention. A few quiet days on a Greek island without cameras or a schedule, even ones eventually caught by a stranger’s phone, look like exactly the kind of break an actor heading into an awards run might need.
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