Remember When Pedro Pascal Was the Villain in the Burn Notice Movie?
The star of Fantastic Four: First Steps, The Mandalorian, and The Last of Us once squared off against Sam Axe in a Burn Notice TV movie.
Before he was Mr. Fantastic, before he was The Mandalorian, before he was the Red Viper of Dorne, Pedro Pascal was the bad guy in the Burn Notice spin-off movie. The A-list actor, who is in three big movies this summer (including Fantastic Four: First Steps), had one of his major early roles in Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe, a 2011 TV movie that served as a prequel to the popular USA Network espionage series focused on Bruce Campbell's Sam Axe.
Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe was not the 50-year-old actor's debut role. Pascal, who was born in Chile before coming to the United States as a young child, began his acting career in the late '90s. His first TV credit was actually in 1999 in an episode of a different USA Network show, the supernatural comedy-drama G v E, also known as Good vs Evil. He had smaller credits here and there throughout the '00s on shows like Law & Order and The Adjustment Bureau, a movie starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt.
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Who does Pedro Pascal play in the Burn Notice movie?
As the 2010s began, Pascal's career started picking up steam, and one early notable credit was Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe. A feature-length TV movie that aired on USA Network on April 17, 2011, The Fall of Sam Axe came out ahead of Burn Notice's fifth season, and it introduced some plot elements that would play out in the following episodes. Set two years before the events of the Burn Notice pilot, the movie followed Bruce Campbells' Axe, who at the time was a U.S. Navy SEAL Commander, as he is forced to go on a mission in Colombia after accidentally having an affair with an Admiral's wife.
His mission is doomed to be a pain in the neck, but Axe discovers that something corrupt and dangerous is happening centered on Pascal's Commandante Veracruz. While he approaches Sam, at first, as an ally, the savvy SEAL quickly figures out he's corrupt and is planning to kill the patients and doctors at a local hospital and blame it on a local militia group, thus tricking the U.S. government into getting involved. Being the ultimate good guy, Sam escapes his captors and helps the people from the hospital go on the run, eventually linking up with the less-than-stellar militia group. Together, they eventually manage to best Veracruz. Sadly, going so wholly against his orders, even for the right reasons, resulted in Sam getting court-martialed.
Luckily, Sam had an ace up his sleeve in the form of a young journalist who documented the truth of the whole thing. It's the end of his military career, but he gets himself an honorable discharge with full pension and a trip to Miami, setting up his role in the TV show.
While viewers knew Axe as a hero from four past seasons of Burn Notice, it takes a great villain to make a good hero shine, and Pascal's ruthless and corrupt Veracruz very much fit the bill.
What movies or shows has Pedro Pascal been in since the Burn Notice movie?
The Fall of Sam Axe premiered to decent ratings and solid critical reviews, though it was just the start of Pascal's rise. He started picking up more TV roles, including an 11-episode stint on yet another USA Network series, Graceland. It was in 2014, though, when he had his breakout role in Season 4 of HBO’s Game of Thrones, playing the charismatic, swarthy, and deadly Oberyn Martell. The character — and especially Pascal’s performance — were an instant sensation, and his stock rapidly started to rise even after Oberyn’s infamous death near the end of the season.
Pascal has had a bounty of high-profile roles since then. He was the lead of Netflix’s crime series Narcos, and he plays the titular character in the first Disney+ Star Wars series, The Mandalorian. Pascal also had a leading role in the first two seasons of another popular HBO series, The Last of Us, which is an adaptation of the acclaimed zombie video game series.
On the big screen, Pascal’s post-Game of Thrones credits include The Great Wall, Triple Frontier, and Wonder Woman 1984, where he played the main villain, Maxwell Lord. More recently, he had a voice role in The Wild Robot and played a Roman general in Gladiator II. In the summer of 2025 alone, he had leading roles in Ari Aster’s neo-Western Eddington, Celine Song’s modern rom-com Materialists, and the Fantastic Four’s debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Fantastic Four: First Steps.
He will reprise the role of Mr. Fantastic in Avengers: Doomsday in 2026.
And to think… before he did all that, he was part of a Burn Notice character’s backstory as seen in a TV movie. And, since Campbell wants another Burn Notice movie, maybe there's a chance that Commandante Veracruz can make a return.
