Awards season alert: we have a double-header coming up this weekend (look at me using a sports term!) with the SAGs on Saturday and Independent Spirit Awards on Sunday. The SAGs always feel like a relief in the middle of the season, because they’re only about actors and therefore clock in at a tight two hours. But given the lean running time, I don’t understand why the SAGs don’t honor supporting actors in the TV categories. They do it for the film actors! That’s my only quibble with the show. And that is how we have this stacked category for Male Actor in a Drama Series, where Billy Crudup (The Morning Show) and Matthew Macfadyen (Succession) — who won the Critics Choice and Emmy in supporting categories, respectively — are nominated for the same roles alongside leading performances by Brian Cox, Kieran Culkin (both Succession), and Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us). All the nominees (save Brian Cox) just participated in a round table discussion for the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, wherein Pedro shared a glimpse of his “psycho” method for learning lines:

“I bet I could show you a psychotic physical example of what I now have to do to learn my lines,” Pascal said in the video that also included Billy Crudup, Matthew Macfadyen and Kieran Culkin. “This is like a psycho first letter of every word. You see the letters, right? Basically, I’m the Unabomber.”

He continued, “You use the first letter of each in these towers or columns, I guess, and it’s this very, very tedious way of making yourself learn the line so that you’re not making choices. It’s not even sort of artistic, it’s just this really technical way I’ve had to acquire because of that horrible experience of forgetting my lines.”

Pascal will seemingly continue using this method of learning his lines for The Fantastic Four, the Marvel film he was recently confirmed to star in as Reed Richards, Mister Fantastic. The actor will also share the screen with Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.

In addition to the superhero movie, Pascal will be seen in the near future in the second season of The Last of Us and the Gladiator sequel.

[From Deadline]

Not to split hairs here, but I’d call that worksheet he revealed more Zodiac Killer than Unabomber, though I concede that’s based on a fleeting glance. This story actually brought out the acting class nerd in me, when he briefly referenced wanting a purely technical method for learning lines. The idea is, you don’t want to predetermine or get stuck in one way of saying a line — at least not at the getting off book stage. Whenever I have anything I want to memorize, my method is equally as tedious as Pedro’s, if a little less convoluted: I handwrite the material in its entirety over and over and over again until I can write it all out by heart. Simple! So I appreciate where Pedro is coming from, and I applaud anyone who champions notetaking by hand. Where I’m losing him is with the practice of only writing out the first letter of a word. Because, you know, a single letter can be the start to any number of different words! What keeps this system from turning into live action mad libs? What stops a Joel Miller line like “You think I can still handle things but I’m not who I was,” from coming out as “Yo that ice cream sundae has triple butterscotch inside new wasabi infused walnuts.” And I love how the rest of the actors try to jump in and save him, like Billy Crudup saying “so you write this shorthand on the script?” And Pedro is like “no.” He knows he’s insane and he’s made peace with it. Hey, whatever works Pedro.

Photos credit: IMAGO/Jennifer Bloc / Avalon, Jeffrey Mayer / Avalon and screenshot from YouTube