For his role in The Last of Us, actor Pedro Pascal is this year’s winner of the Best Hero award at the MTV Movie & TV Awards. As fans of the show will know, the show features Pascal in the role of Joel, a hardened smuggler who serves as a protector for Ellie, a teenage girl played by Bella Ramsey. The role has been highly acclaimed, catapulting Pascal even further into the stratosphere as one of today’s hottest stars, so it’s not the biggest shocker to see the actor claiming the Best Hero honor at the awards show.
“I want to say thank you, MTV Movie & TV Awards,” Pascal says in his acceptance speech. “I am a child of MTV. I grew up on MTV. So, this means the absolute world to me.”
Pascal also spoke about how 77.5 million people voted for the awards show this year, making it all the more honorable that he was the one named as Best Hero by the people.
“[It] blows my mind, and just makes it such an honor,” Pascal said, clearly happy to get the win. “All the young people in the world are my heroes, and I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”
With that said, there were some other good options that were up. The other nominees included Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams in Wednesday; Diego Luna as Cassian Andor in Andor; Paul Rudd as Scott Lang in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania; and Tom Cruise as Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick.
The Best Hero award was first introduced in 2006, when Christian Bale won for playing Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins. The award was retired the following year before coming back in 2012, and has served as an annual award at the MTV Movie & TV Awards ever since. Some of the other previous winners include Henry Cavill as Clark Kent in Man of Steel, Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa in Black Panther, Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark in Avengers: Endgame, and Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Last year, Scarlett Johansson won for playing Natasha Romanoff in Black Widow.
Pedro Pascal Will Return as Joel
This was also the second time Pascal had been nominated for this same award. In 2021, he was nominated for Best Hero for his role as Din Djarin in The Mandalorian. Pascal is still going strong in that role as well, as the third season of the Star Wars series recently concluded on Disney+. While the future of that show remains to be seen, we know Pascal will be back to playing Joel in The Last of Us, as the show has been renewed and plans are to start filming the second season in the coming months.
You can stream The Last of Us on HBO Max.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
