Pedro Pascal has doubled down on his criticism of JK Rowling weeks after he accused her of ‘heinous loser behaviour’.
The Last Of Us star directly blasted the Harry Potter author, 59, in April after she celebrated the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of women, which could exclude trans women from single-sex spaces.
It has been reported that Rowling donated £70k of her own money to the Scottish campaigners behind the Supreme Court appeal, which has faced widespread protest from trans rights activists and anger from high-profile figures such as Nicola Coughlan.
Pascal, who has a transgender sister Lux, has long been a vocal trans ally such as wearing t-shirts that say ‘protect the dolls’ on the red carpet.
After sharing a video on Instagram calling Rowling out and encouraging people to boycott future Harry Potter projects, the 50-year-old Hollywood star wrote: ‘Awful disgusting S*** is exactly right. Heinous LOSER behavior.’
He appears to have no regrets over the comments, however, as he reflected on the backlash and his decision to publicly slam Rowling in a new interview with Vanity Fair.
The Mandalorian actor admitted that at first, after seeing the widespread reaction, he felt like ‘that kid that got sent to the principal’s office a lot for behavioural issues in public schools in Texas feeling scared and thinking, What’d I do?”.
However, he added: ‘The one thing that I would say I agonised over a little bit was just, “Am I helping? Am I f**king helping?”.
‘It’s a situation that deserves the utmost elegance so that something can actually happen, and people will actually be protected. Listen, I want to protect the people I love. But it goes beyond that. Bullies make me f**king sick.’
His older sister, Javiera Balmaceda, also made her support for her brother clear.
‘It is heinous loser behaviour. And he said that as the older brother to someone saying that our little sister doesn’t exist,’ she explained to the publication.
There has been mounting criticism of Rowling’s attitudes towards the transgender community, the latest of which comes from Sir Stephen Fry who has previously defended the author.
In a change of stance, he recently claimed at a live event that she had been ‘radicalised’ by TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) and the ‘vitriol that has been thrown at her’.
‘It is unhelpful and only hardens her and will only continue to harden her, I am afraid.’ He added that she is a ‘lost cause for us’.
‘I am not saying that she should not be called out when she says things that are really cruel, wrong and mocking.’
Pascal himself has been lumped in the same category as David Tennant who has also spoken up for trans rights.
During the British LGBT Awards he called out Kemi Badenoch and uplifted the trans community, later calling anti-trans groups ‘a tiny bunch of little whinging f****** [that] are on the wrong side of history and they’ll all go away soon.’
Rowling specifically called the Doctor Who star out on social medai for his comments, later poking fun at him when Badenoch became leader of the Conservative Party.
Asked about his thoughts on Rowling’s public attack on him during ITV show The Assembly, he said: ‘Listen, JK Rowling is a wonderful author who has created brilliant stories and I wish her no ill will but I hope that we can all, as a society, just let people be. Just get out of people’s way.’
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