There is a particular species of Instagram post that transcends mere nostalgia and becomes something closer to a cultural event. Sarah Michelle Gellar has posted one. It features a very young Pedro Pascal.
The photograph — or rather, the screencap — is from “The Freshman,” the opening episode of Buffy’s fourth season. Pascal played Eddie, a hapless UC Sunnydale freshman who is, to put it diplomatically, not long for this world. He meets Buffy, seems briefly like he might become a friend, and is then turned into a vampire by Sunday, the season’s opening antagonist, before he can really find his groove. College is hard.
Gellar captioned the photograph “When #Mother met #Father,” which is a reference to Pedro Pascal’s current cultural status as everyone’s Cool Slutty Daddy — a designation he has accepted with the good humour of someone who has made peace with being the internet’s collective father figure. The post promptly went as viral as anything on Instagram is capable of going.
What happened next was, if anything, better.
Entertainment Tonight caught Pascal on a red carpet and showed him the post. His reaction — “Sarah Michelle Gellar posted about me?” asked with the incredulity of a man who cannot quite believe this is real life — was immediately clipped and circulated across every platform that hosts short videos. He then said he needed to “get on the World Wide Web,” which is the most endearing sentence a person could possibly say in 2023.
He remembered everything about the shoot. He told ET that Gellar had ice cream in her trailer and gave him some. That he had to have lunch wearing the vampire prosthetic mask because the schedule was that tight. That he missed the opening night of a play he was appearing in to shoot the scene where his character is staked. “I remember everything,” he said. And he clearly did.
This is, at its heart, a simple story: a very famous person was once a not-very-famous person who did a guest spot on an important television show, and twenty-five years later the star of that show remembered him fondly and the internet collectively lost its mind. But it is also a reminder that Buffy’s guest cast — which included, over seven seasons, an extraordinary number of people who went on to considerable things — experienced something real in those productions. Pascal remembers the ice cream. He remembers the mask. He missed his play for a staking scene that lasted forty seconds on screen.
The Freshman. Season four, episode one. Go and watch it. You will see the future Joel Miller and Din Djarin, looking extremely young, navigating a vampire attack with the confused energy of a man who has absolutely no idea what he has stumbled into.
He looks like he is having a very good time.
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