Words by Fiorella Valdesolo
In the 1950s and ’60s designer Pierre Balmain called some of the most celebrated actresses of the era like Katharine Hepburn, Sophia Loren, and Rita Hayworth regular clients. The legendary couturier wasn’t just outfitting them for red-carpet events; he was also often dressing them for their performances on screen and on stage. When Loren played Epifania, the wealthiest woman in the world in Peter Sellers’s 1960 rom-com The Millionaress, it was Balmain’s belted black leather dress and knee-length cinched cream tulle shrouded in pearls and crystals that telecasted her wealth and status. For Hepburn’s turn as the same character on the London stage, she too was dressed by Balmain, most memorably in an opulent embroidered gown with long matching gloves.
The iconic fashion house’s cinematic legacy is one that actress (and occasional model) Lux Pascal was thinking about when she was, at the behest of the newest designer at its helm, Antonin Tron, sitting front row next to Naomi Watts at his highly anticipated March debut. The show was a femme fatale-coded master class in sensual power dressing with whiffs of The Hunger and Blade Runner and even Epifania’s black leather fit as worn by Loren in 1960. “He told me that he was inspired by the brand’s post-war beginnings and how old Hollywood glamour might be translated in the 1980s,” says Pascal, who was photographed wearing a long slip skirt and plunging button-down, with a lace bodysuit peeking out. “I had four different looks they had prepared for me to wear, and I was just beaming trying on each one. I felt like a movie star from a classic film noir.”
Fashion and film have a symbiotic relationship for Pascal, stretching back to when she was a kid enthralled with cinema growing up in Chile. “I’ve always been inspired by the silhouettes I saw in the movies,” says Pascal, who even in sweats and zero makeup via Zoom exudes an easy elegance. “I would try to replicate what the actresses were wearing,” she adds, citing favorites like the dramatic, color-saturated looks of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or the romanticism of Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides. Fashion’s ability to shape and morph how someone presents themselves to the world, how it can be the ultimate vehicle for inhabiting a character, even one radically different from who you are, has long intrigued Pascal. And since tiptoeing into the public eye in the last few years, the fashion world, for all its exclusive pretense, has felt to Pascal incredibly welcoming. This season she was sitting front row at Balmain and Bottega Veneta, and last she was walking the runway for Matthieu Blazy’s inaugural collection for Chanel.
But Pascal’s love of fashion is born of her love of cinema, something fostered both by her older brother Pedro (17 years her senior, he would regularly dispatch VHS tapes back to his youngest sibling in Chile; she also has another brother and sister) and her father, José Balmaceda, a reproductive endocrinologist. “My dad was a major movie fan,” Pascal shares. “Growing up I would go with him to the movies at least once a week, maybe twice. Some days we would even leave one movie, go have lunch, and then go back to the theater and see another.” She was born in Orange County, California, where her parents had eventually retreated (after a stint in Denmark) after being forced into political exile from Chile during Augusto Pinochet’s reign; they returned to Chile when she was three. Her mother, Verónica Pascal, a child psychologist, died a few years later in 1999. “One of my last memories of my mom was making pottery with her,” recalls Pascal. In her final years, Verónica had started making art in earnest (ceramics, painting, collages, poetry) and developed, says her daughter, a signature aesthetic. “My mother was very attuned, very sensitive, a really sophisticated being,” Pascal says, smiling softly. The loss is one that is still deeply felt by her and her siblings; both she and Pedro use their mother’s last name as an homage.
“Dance and learning how to center my body taught me so much about being on stage.”
Though watching movies laid the groundwork, Pascal’s path to acting was bumpy at first. Always a model student, when she enrolled in a demanding theater program at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, she had difficulties. “I wasn’t used to being on stage, and it felt very awkward to me,” Pascal confesses. But her determination and fierce work ethic trumped her awkwardness; a foray into dance, thanks to a choreographer who took her under her wing and whose company she would eventually perform with, helped immensely too. “Dance and learning how to center my body taught me so much about being on stage,” says Pascal.
After graduating, her professional life started almost immediately. Pascal was dancing, performing in theater productions, and appearing in films and TV series including Narcos; she was busy but felt like when it came to acting, she had a lot more to learn. So, she auditioned for the Juilliard School, got in, and uprooted her life to move to New York to attend what is arguably the most prestigious arts university in the world. Because she had the privilege of matriculating when she had already had a career, she felt like she was able to enjoy the experience of being in school. With a container to learn and grow as an artist, Pascal put her head down and focused intently on mastering what she had come to love. “I took that shit so seriously that I was passing on every single professional opportunity that was being offered to me even when my managers were like, maybe you should go for this role because it’s a big deal,” says Pascal, her big brown eyes widening.
The opportunity to play the lead in Netflix’s Miss Carbón (Queen of Coal), an Argentinian film about the story of Carla Antonella Rodriguez, a trans woman who was the first female miner in Patagonia, came at the end of her graduating year. Director Agustina Macri’s sole choice for the role of Carla was Pascal. “I was like I’ll pay attention to this when I’m done with school, and if she’s still interested in me, I’m interested,” she adds. Macri waited, and Pascal was cast after graduation. Her turn as Carla is exceptional. Pascal has an openness and quiet power that is riveting to watch on screen. While Miss Carbón is at its core a story about transness, it’s just as much a story about women and power and the workplace, and the ones who risk everything with steely determination for what they believe is right. Carrying on in the tradition of Sally Field in Norma Rae and Charlize Theron in North Country, Pascal in Miss Carbón is a force of nature. Meeting the real Carla convinced her to take the part, but she was admittedly still a bit hesitant. “I’m very wary of stories that are centered around someone’s gender identity because I don’t want to make a parade of it,” says Pascal.
Pascal herself transitioned in 2021. Pedro, ever the supportive brother, posted a picture on his Instagram after her announcement captioned: Mi hermana, mi corazón, nuestra Lux, which translates to “my sister, my heart, our Lux.” “He always drives me to be authentic and to trust myself,” she says, adding that her relationship with all three of her siblings is extremely tight. “At the end of the day I know who I am and what I want.” Since uprooting her career to America, her instincts thus far have proved to be right. She had a small, but pivotal, role in Ryan Murphy’s much-discussed The Beauty — “Maybe it’s not the smartest thing to say, but I will do anything Ryan asks me to,” she claims, laughing. And this fall she will star in Cry to Heaven, an oft-overlooked Anne Rice book that is a masterful study of art and identity through the lens of a historical epic about Italian castrati; it’s being adapted for the screen by designer and director Tom Ford. Ford’s films A Single Man and Nocturnal Animals, not to mention his ’90s Gucci heyday, were formative for Pascal. Ford offered her the part without an audition. “My team called me and said they’re going to send you the script, which they weren’t even allowed to read, and you have to give us an answer as soon as you can,” she recounts. “I told them, ‘I’ll read it, but it doesn’t matter, because the answer is yes.’ He’s remarkable!” Though Pascal, sworn to secrecy, can’t share many details about Cry to Heaven yet, she says it’s exquisitely written and that she understood immediately why Ford had tapped her. “I knew exactly who this person was,” says Pascal. “In the dialogue there isn’t much revealed, but everything is there.”
“To me, to be an artist, you kind of have to live multiple lives.”
She sees Ford, much like Carla, as someone who has led multiple lives. Someone who, in our modern vernacular, contains multitudes. It’s a quality Pascal believes is required of her as an actress. “To me, to be an artist, you kind of have to live multiple lives,” says Pascal. A few days after our chat, Harrison Ford would say something similar in his lifetime achievement speech at the SAG-AFTRA awards. Ford said: “As actors, we get to live many lives. We get to explore ideas that affirm and elevate our shared experience. The stories we tell have a unique capacity to create moments of emotional connection; they bring us together. … We share the privilege of working in the world of ideas, of empathy, of imagination.” For Pascal, her artistic path is a profession and a passion, and, often, its own form of advocacy. As for how she’s choosing the parts she takes, the stories she wants to be a part of telling, Pascal is resisting the urge to get too analytical about the process and be more instinctual instead. To do that she goes back to the discipline she learned as a dancer in Chile: Do, then think. Spoken like a true vanguard.
Words by Fiorella Valdesolo, Photography by Xavi Gordo, Styling by J. Errico
Hair by Peter Gray at Home Agency using @owayusaofficial, Hair Assistance by Chiaki Morimoto
Makeup by Kabuki using Dior Forever Skin Perfect, Manicure by Miss Pop using Chanel Le Vernis assisted by Sanzou
On Set Production by Jean Jarvis for Area1202
