Pedro Pascal covers the July/August issue of Vanity Fair to promote the roughly two dozen projects he’s a part of (and yet none of them feature Nicole Kidman; given how much they work, it’s a statistical inevitability at this point that they’ll star opposite each other soon, right?). While the photoshoot captures him baring arms and legs — though never at the same time, that would truly be the last of us — in the interview, Pedro fully bears his heart. He shares a lot about being raised by his mother, and the colossal impact of losing her to suicide shortly before his 25th birthday. And he talks up another formidable female presence: his rescue dog Gretta, a foster fail Pedro took in six months after his mother’s passing. She hopped into bed with him and it was all over. Pedro named her after Patricia Clarkson’s character in the 1998 movie High Art, which they were listening to that fateful night through the wall from a neighboring apartment. A few highlights from this wonderful profile:

He survived the lean years thanks to his rescue pup: However depressing his life, his pit-bull-mix rescue, Gretta, would meet him excitedly at the door. Gretta’s silhouette was intimidating enough that Pascal could walk her at 3 a.m. to deposit his crumpled wad of tips into a Chase ATM without fear. “She saved my life, that dog, because she gave me someone to go home to,” Pascal says, searching through the Gretta album on his phone to show me pictures.

His mother dropped him off at the movies when she couldn’t get a babysitter: He remembers being seven and in heaven, able to squeeze in two and a half showings of Poltergeist before his mom returned for him. At home he’d reenact scenes of being sucked into the closet or slide across the kitchen floor. [Sister Javiera] Balmaceda tells me, “When our parents got cable, the HBO song would come on and Pedro would run around the house yelling, ‘A movie is coming! A movie is coming!’”

Gretta passed just as his career took off: “I think about how poor I was when I had Gretta,” Pascal says. “I think about when I had double shifts and I couldn’t find anybody to let her out and we were living in this sh-thole apartment in Red Hook, and I think about the bougie life she would be leading with me now as opposed to then and I grieve, I really do.” He chokes back a sob, then laughs at himself for being once more overcome.

On calling J.K. Rowling a ‘heinous loser’: “The one thing that I would say I agonized 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.”

What he misses about his mother: Her beauty. Her smell. How funny she was, and how funny she found farts. “She couldn’t get past a fart of any kind without it absolutely destabilizing her into hysterics,” says Pascal. “She thought they were the most brilliant, hilarious, wonderful thing in the world.” She was also “very deep-feeling, very complex, very, very out of reach in a way,” he adds.

[From Vanity Fair]

Yes, I had to include Pedro talking about how his mother fell to pieces over farts! Partly out of deference to my own mother, who made sure that the first thing I knew about Benjamin Franklin was that he wrote an essay titled “Fart Proudly.” And then simply out of desperation, because once again, this man is out to kill us with his magnanimity, is he not?! How is he in our timeline? We do not deserve him! Standing up to bullies, lamenting that Gretta passed (of old age, thank dog) before he had the success/funds to pamper her the way she deserved… I’m not sobbing, YOU ARE. This one hits real close for me right now, as my family had to say goodbye to our own great lady over the weekend. She was my aunt’s dog and, like Pedro, saw my aunt through a significant chapter of her life (and mine, too). Our pups give us everything they have, and they truly don’t care if you’re a celeb or not. Though we all know how uber busy he is, I do hope Pedro finds his way towards welcoming another rescue. Maybe Glen Powell and Brisket can give him some tips on being a working daddy-dog duo.

Lastly, I don’t think I’ll ever get the image out of my head of little kid Pedro running around the house declaring, “A movie is coming! A movie is coming!”

Pedro Pascal for Vanity Fair

📸: Sølve Sundsbø pic.twitter.com/IOSQOk4za3

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Bonus Pedro Pascal in 2016 (airport photo in gallery is from 2014):

Photos credit: Cat Morley/Avalon, Julie Edwards/Avalon, Carlos Tischler/EyePix/INSTARimages, Getty and via Instagram and Twitter/Vanity Fair, MediaPunch / BACKGRID