Pedro Pascal Played a Vampire in Buffy — But He Also Played One Somewhere Else

The discovery that Pedro Pascal played a briefly-vamped freshman named Eddie in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s fourth season premiere has been one of the more pleasing internet moments of recent months. But it turns out Eddie was not Pascal’s only foray into vampire territory. In 2015, he played a vampire called Max in Bloodsucking Bastards — a horror comedy that, in retrospect, deserves considerably more attention than it received.

The premise of Brian James O’Connell’s film is a fairly elegant one: an aggressive corporate vampire who takes over a failing sales office, turning the employees into bloodsuckers in order to improve their productivity. The joke — that the difference between a vampire lord and a particularly driven manager is largely semantic — sustains the film rather well, and Pascal, playing Max with the energy of someone who finds the role genuinely funny, is the main reason why.

Max is, as Collider described him, “cocky, over-confident, and pretty much a prick” — a womaniser who holds grudges and treats his employees as assets to be exploited and then literally drained. He makes grandiose speeches about seduction and sales. He sets impossible goals. He is a ruthless killing machine who also happens to be trying to hit quarterly targets. It is exactly the kind of role that benefits from an actor who commits completely and plays it for real rather than for winking self-consciousness, which is precisely what Pascal does.

The film is available on Tubi and has been quietly rediscovered since Pascal’s profile exploded via The Mandalorian and The Last of Us. It also connects to the rest of his career in an unexpected way: four years after Bloodsucking Bastards, Pascal played another character named Max — Maxwell Lord in Wonder Woman 1984 — who is also a go-getter capitalist willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. The parallel is, once you notice it, impossible to unsee.

Eddie in Buffy was Pascal’s introduction to vampire storytelling: the victim, staked within forty seconds of being turned, not long enough on screen to do much. Bloodsucking Bastards let him play the other side. He was, by all accounts, very good at it.